LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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istie-w IBOOIKIS- 



Fall of 1881. 



MAN'S ORIGIN AND DESTINY. Sketched from the 
Platform of the Physical Sciences. By Prof. J. P. Les- 
ley, Secretary American Philosophical Society, etc. 
New and Enlarged Edition. 8vo. Cloth. $2.00. 

ECCE SPIRITUS. i2mo. Cloth. $1.25. 

A STUDY OF THE PENTATEUCH. By Rufus P. 
Stebbins, D.D. i2mo. Cloth. $1.25. 

THE WAY OF LIFE. By George S. Merriam. i6mo. 
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TENDER AND TRUE. Poems of Love. Selected by 
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GEO. H ELLIS, Publisher, 

14.1 Franklin St., Boston. 



ECCE SPIRITUS. 



A STATEMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE 
OF JESUS AS THE LAW OF LIFE. 



" Howbeit y when he, the Spirit of Truths is come, he will guide 
you unto all truth." 



THE LIBRARY 
Or CONGRESS 

WASHINGTON 






7 




BOSTON: 

George H'. Ellis, 141 Franklin Street. 

1881. 









Copyright, 

1881, 

By Georgb H. Ellis. 



Dear Spirit, if within thy sunny heart 

A memory lives of this which is so fraught 
With thee, since once we shared it, thou hast part 

In such fulfilment as this day has brought. 
Yet what sweet hope was in the work we wrought 

Of word of thine, beyond the world's dispraise, 
To crown it worthy ! And what bitter thought 

Now it falls silent in the empty ways ! 
And yet could aught without some virtue be 
That once was thine, and still so speaks of thee ? 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Negative Work and Positive Want of 

the Nineteenth Century, i 

II. Sources of Christian Authority, 17 

III. Natural or Supernatural, 34 

IV. Christian Power, 49 

V. Spirituality, 63 

VI. Nature and Spirit, 84 

VII. God or Christ, 99 

VIII. Doctrine vs. Personal Endowment, 114 

IX. Selfhood of Jesus, 130 

X. The Personal Element, 144 

XI. Life, 154 

XII. Immortal Life, 175 

XIII. Immortal Life {Continued), 193 

XIV. Symbolism of the Cross, 210 

XV. The Faith of the Future, 224 



CHAPTER I. 

THE NEGATIVE WORK AND POSITIVE WANT OF THE 
NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

To one who watches the revolutions of religious 
thought, without any faith in human progress or abil- 
ity to see beneath the shifting surface an underlying 
principle ever tending toward harmony and positive- 
ness of result, there must be much of discourage- 
ment. It has been the sad duty of modern times not 
to inaugurate, — for the tendency has long been latent, 
— but to carry out to full effect the battle against 
time -honored comforts and sacred associations, a 
duty from the sadness of which no one has been able 
wholly to escape. Those who would not fight must 
perforce witness the battle, and share, if only inciden- 
tally, in its sorrow. Even to stand aloof in such age is 
to be disturbed and unsettled by the din of intellectual 
warfare, and choked and blinded with the smoke of 
controversy; while so-called liberalism, beyond its 
own inner struggle and loss, has suffered under the 
added necessity of bringing pain to others. 

The age shows two marked characteristics, not 
peculiar to itself, but emphasized as they never were 
before : the unflinching honesty which does not hesi- 
tate to test traditional faith by the facts of science 



2 JEJcce Spiritus. 

and the highest reason ; and the radical unrest, the un- 
satisfied craving, the uneasy consciousness of spiritual 
need which go with it. The age is in that undesira- 
ble, that intermediate condition, where the things of 
childhood are no longer tolerated, while the things of 
manhood have not yet fully come. But herein there is 
one certainty: fidelity to the facts, absolute honesty, 
are here ; and they are here to stay. Whatever else 
men would have, they will have no denial of the cer- 
tainties of nature and that reason which is from God. 
Christianity has been particularly unfortunate in 
the influences to which it has been subjected at the 
hands of its successive adherents. If it were not 
something definite and unmistakable of itself, it must 
necessarily become an ever-varying quantity accord- 
ing to the shading it would receive in different states 
of society and stages of culture. That it was such 
has been the assertion of its representatives, and yet 
its history is the record of continual growth and 
change. It has been affected by the course of civiliza- 
tion, but cannot claim more of cause than effect in 
the general modification of race tendencies. The tide 
of a new life of intellectual, social, and material power 
had already set in before Christianity had entered 
upon its best development, and helped to lift it yet 
higher. It could not have come to anything like ful- 
ness of j^ower, even externally, except in an age of 
general awakening to and aptitude for light. But it 
was inevitable here, as in its earliest inception, that 
its acceptance should take on a very positive form. 
There was nothing of the philosopher's position in the 



Work and Want of the Nineteenth Century. 3 

attitude of the primitive Christians. With Grecian 
many-sidedness of intellectual vision, they did not fail 
to see anything of special sacredness in the breadth 
and comprehensiveness of their outlook ; but, with a 
certain narrowness that verged to the other extreme, 
they dogmatized the statements of Jesus into a rig- 
idity and positiveness that they would not bear. 
The new church was new only in name, form, and 
intensity. The power, authority, was old, even 
before Abraham was. Hence, infinite harm to the 
movement, in an assertiveness which went far be- 
yond any sanction given it by the Master, — a barm 
which is seen more clearly with every year of its 
developing life. From this came the utter deadness 
of the Middle Ages, and that immorality which tran- 
scended ail the recorded wickedness of men in the 
hypocritical sanctity that characterized it. Then, 
the first blow was struck against traditional Chris- 
tianity, in its claim of authority and salvation in and 
of itself to the disregard of all living and higher 
necessities. The first protest against false assump- 
tion and perversion came not from without, but from 
within. It was not unevangelical free thought, but 
the resuscitated spirit of Jesus within the lines of 
recognized communion, which first revolted from 
traditional Christianity. The negative work began 
in the Church; and the Church, not science, has to 
bear the responsibility for that movement of emanci- 
pation by which it has itself been constantly weak- 
ened. The faithlessness and unspirituality of our 
day lie at the door of council and priesthood. The 



4 Ecce Spiritus. 

holy function, the divine principle, have been mixed 
with falsity and overstatement so long that an at- 
titude of doubt — nay, worse, of indifference — has 
been bred both within and outside of the Church. 
Christianity has claimed both too much and not 
enough. It has omitted to see the facts as they 
are, and to harmonize itself therewith ; and it has 
monstrously overestimated the prerogative delegated 
by Jesus to the Church. Hence came the spirit out 
of the loins of Christianity itself, which has been 
silently, but surely, undermining its power. Science 
and its attendant material prosperity have helped this 
on ; but the real j>rotest has come from the religious 
nature of man, from the reason unsatisfied, the spirit- 
ual need unmet, the integrity of mind and heart be- 
trayed and duped on every hand. 

The influence of the scientific tendency has been 
far overrated in this connection. The spirit of inves- 
tigation and mental activity cannot be hostile to the 
reception of any genuine comfort and assurance which 
is craved by the nature of man. It becomes one of 
the friends of that most truly religious attitude which 
would be satisfied, not falsely supported and momenta- 
rily quieted, in its longing for the highest. The spir- 
itual life of the world can have suffered nothing at 
the hands of an age of keen and not easily satisfied 
pursuit of truth. Science with religion struck at the 
false and superstitious, readily echoing and carrying 
out the progressive protests of a Luther, a Wesley, a 
Fox, and a Channing ; but the negative work of the 
nineteenth century is the immediate product of the 



Work and Want of the Nineteenth Century. 5 

cloister and a reactionary congregation. It is inci- 
dentally the result of general forces working in our 
life; but, primarily, the dogmas have been relin- 
quished, because the religious nature has found them 
groundless and not calculated to satisfy. 

History and science show that there can be nothing 
lost of forces working honestly and consistently, that 
they can but make for order, wholeness, and positive- 
ness of result. There can be no really destructive 
work on the part of science. It is everywhere posi- 
tive, on the side of the facts, everywhere the lover 
of truth. It is the Church that has to deal with the 
problem of an apathy and faithlessness which is born 
of the deepest religious consciousness. Science has 
helped the emphasis laid by the soul upon the unsatis- 
factory position of the Church. It has thrown into 
stronger light the necessity for fact, and all harmony, 
with fact, as a sufficient basis for spiritual assurance. 
But it is the religious consciousness, the inward and 
eternal needs of the soul, that the Church has to rec- 
ognize and meet, not science. If it subdues again to 
its lost allegiance the whole rounded nature of man, 
it has nothing to fear from the universe. The of- 
fended deity of fact and reason it is to placate is in 
the mind, and not in any revelation of matter. It 
has taken the soul of man, honestly hungry after 
truth, into a sphere of assumption and makeshift 
reality which it has not suffered man to gauge at its 
worth, but has insisted upon with dogmatic finality 
as sacred and certain. The reaction which came 
was, as might have been expected, revolutionary and 



6 Ecce Spiritus. 

sweeping, having to do not only with the credal state- 
ments, but with the entire attitude and spirit of the 
Church as well. As was but too natural, the denial 
did not stop with doctrine, but touched the Church 
whose existence was bound up with it, nay, even relig- 
ion itself. And the destructive work was not seen 
alone in the constantly increasing ranks of those 
who put themselves entirely outside the sphere of 
religious things, but equally in that painful doubt 
and indifference on the part of those who outwardly 
profess and further its cause. The keenest thrust 
under which traditional Christianity writhes is the 
toleration and temporizing among its own adhe- 
rents. The doubt and questioning, the want of rest 
and satisfaction, which drove the free thinker out of 
church fellowshij^, did not go out with him; they still 
remain emasculating the meaningless iteration of faiths 
and formulas which pass the lips, but find no intel- 
ligent response from within. The saddest thing, 
about the Church in our day is the excuses that are 
openly made for its existence. Socially, morally, 
even financially, it is admitted to be a public neces- 
sity ; for no one would think of locating in a town 
unprovided with churches, no matter what his indi- 
vidual convictions might be. Then, since in the 
minds of even its members, disheartened in the effort 
to reconcile present want with wornrout opportunity, 
the Church is no longer what it pretends to be, 
a saving and special sanctity, the aisles are filled 
with mildly incredulous or disrespectfully doubtful 
or wearily indifferent faces. The many who to-day 



Work and Want of the Nineteenth Century. 7 

attend its services and tolerate its creeds do not con- 
stitute the strength, but the real weakness of evan- 
gelical Christianity. There are only the elements 
of decay in such half-way adherence. The Church 
has grown tentative in its efforts after divine verity. 
A trembling hesitancy, a half-apologetic honesty, 
mingles with the utterances of positive statement. 
The very tone of the verbal response, and the frank 
confessions of the street, rob the service of its in- 
tended efficacy, and indeed tend to surround the 
whole subject of churchly worship with an air of 
insincerity. 

Let us not exaggerate here. There are still many 
who consistently hold to the old beliefs; but the 
churches are by no means filled with such, nor is the 
drift even of church life toward, but rather away 
from, greater strictness of accord between thought 
and worship. But the age, its spirit and truest life, 
is not wholly represented in the churches. Statistics 
everywhere confirm the impression of a vast falling- 
off in all outward recognition of religion. The real 
thought of the age is not uttered in pulpit avowals 
which find more or less of a response from the pews. 
The word " negation " does not adequately express 
the attitude of the time. Complacent toleration, 
which is only a more fatal form of the same disorder, 
and utter indifference, are the still more dishearten- 
ing phases of our life with which the restatement of 
spiritual consciousness has to contend. And the sad- 
ness of this position does not lie in the fact that men 
do not want to know, but, beyond this, in the fact 



8 JEcce Spiritus. 

that, baffled and bewildered alike by the tone of relig- 
ious history and the confusion and unsatisfactoriness 
of present opportunity, they have been thrown back 
on the one resource of careless indifference. They 
have watched the long trial and evident failure of 
dogmatic religion, and have declared in all practical 
ways that dogma is no longer what men want. But 
they are hungry for life. An insatiable craving for 
insight and assurance is the accompaniment, many 
voices to the contrary notwithstanding, of great intel- 
lectual activity and wide achievement in every other 
sphere. The increase of material comfort only em- 
phasizes the need of inward experience. The under- 
standing of nature intensifies in just the ratio of its 
completeness the longing for higher and more endur- 
ing knowledge. This is the final and sure result, how- 
ever untrue it may be of the first stage of awakening 
to a wonderland of fact and certainty just at hand. In 
the dead ages there has been equal deadness of intel- 
lectual and spiritual life. Science and spirituality 
have in general risen and slumbered together, the 
former stimulating the latter none the less because it 
has introduced new and higher standards and made 
the acceptance of faith far more difficult. It has 
never seriously affected the spiritual impulse, even 
while insisting that its premises and conclusions were 
false to the facts. 

In the pushing, practical, never-satisfied life of our 
day there is found no exception to this statement. 
Never did a deeper unrest pervade society, implying, 
as it does, ceaseless effort and longing to attain relig- 



Work and Want of the Nineteenth Century. 9 

ious certainty. There is wide-spread want, the ache 
of hungering natures, in the negations, nay, in the 
utter lifelessness, of the time. Out of our wonderful 
material prosperity comes intensified longing, born of 
the bitter contrast between outer and inner establish- 
ment, and of a demand for that inward harmony 
which is now all that is needed to complete the 
comfort which becomes the more imperious as a con- 
sideration amid circumstances of external fulness and 
beauty. With a world subject to our use, a longer 
average and more healthful record of life, has yet 
come no proportionate advance in soul assurance. 
The fall to the inevitable state of human trouble 
is all the more sudden and unbearable, and the re- 
covery, the reaction, which can alone come from 
forces within, is all the more appalling in its diffi- 
culty, amid surroundings of ease and plenty. The 
negation is itself largely negative. It is not so much 
assertive as sad. It sees no added hope nor joy, and, 
painfully conscious of the difficulties arrayed against 
it though it be, confesses by its very activity the 
presence of a something yet seeking satisfaction. 
Its incredulousness must not be mistaken for unwill- 
ingness to be enlightened and enlivened. Supernat- 
uralism has failed to satisfy, and is moreover opposed 
to the entire spirit of the age. If anything else were 
possible in its place, not so opposed, and as truly 
reliable as it is consoling, it would eagerly accept it. 
But, in the lack of hint or hope of such a consumma- 
tion, it settles back, sad and unexpectant, yet proudly 
unwilling to complain of the common lot. 



10 Ecce Spiritus. 

For the comfort of such, a mental position, it may 
be said that there is all history to prove that this state 
of things cannot be more than temporary and transi- 
tional. There is a negative stage in human progress; 
but in nature, as in life, there is no negation. The 
race cannot stop here, nor indeed anywhere. "We see 
a time of movement, but not of disintegration. Law 
and precedent have not been for a moment set aside. 
The unmistakable drift of life, seen here as every- 
where else, forbids the assumption that this is all. If 
indeed it were, we should still say that the destruc- 
tive work, so far as it had reference to the facts, was 
right and good, at the same time that the spirit of 
it was false and fatal. "We can find no sympathy with 
iconoclasm which exists for its own sake ; while we 
must regard the pioneer work, which clears the ground 
for a better growth, as one of the most positive and 
beneficent factors in human life. There can be no 
school of the negations. Men cannot rally around 
nothing. To die for a fallacy or a superstition, as yet 
undisproved, has a certain logic, where to live for a 
moment in utter denial would be impossible. The 
positions of even materialism have been on the side of 
a more positive spirituality, so far as they have existed 
at all. They are often sad, but never, when honest, 
despicable. Even they have confessed that there is 
something in nature whereby they are vaguely im- 
pressed, as if, they cannot well see how, a God were 
back of all the 23henomena of change. Xow and then, 
the momentary detection of what seems to them the 
movement of a divine impulse in human history and 



Work and Want of the Nineteenth Century. 11 

experience stirs them to a faint responsiveness. But, 
ere they are aware, the chain of evidence is inter- 
rupted by something chilling in themselves or from 
without, which does not so much call in question, as 
discover an inability to longer sustain so sublimated 
a flight. 

If it be true that the honesty of the facts is fixed 
as one of the conditions of our possible religious life, 
it is also true that the needs of our time are not 
gauged by any external standard. There is predic- 
tion of something satisfactory to come in the very 
imperiousness of that want which, while unwilling to 
ignore the testimony and bearing of matter, cannot 
be fulfilled therein. The question grows almost to 
painful suspense with the weight of the interests at 
stake, if, out of the negative work done, anything is 
left of possible and satisfactory religious life. The 
want looks as a necessity to that which is positive, 
the positiveness of which, however, must rest on a 
new and better basis. Everywhere, the need is 
acknowledged of comfort in trial, of fresh incentives 
in life, of an outlook more inspiring; and all to be 
not antagonistic to, but harmonized with, the existing 
law of things as revealed in the study of the universe 
as it is. 

It will not do for us to overlook this present neces- 
sity, which is here with a deep significance. Any 
want of satisfaction in a nature and time like ours is 
of itself portentous. The moment for an understand- 
ing of the subtle relationship there is between the 
negative work and the positive want, which alike 



12 Ecce Spiritus. 

characterize our age, has come. At least there is a 
class of minds ready for the undertaking. Out of 
that deep expectancy of our time, — an expectancy 
found alike in philosophical and religious circles, — of 
a new era of spirituality, of a reaction which shall 
throw mankind higher than ever before upon the 
shore of certainty, comes indeed the necessity for this. 

Man can never return whither he has come. Any 
hope of a renewal of religious life must be based on 
the perception of this fact, and the necessity for a new 
departure in method and stand-point. A new set of 
elements have entered into the account. He is as- 
sured, beyond the possibility of any future question, 
of certain fundamental conditions which must for- 
ever incapacitate the old data for satisfying his reason. 
They have had thorough trial, and he is incredulous 
until the key-note of a widely different position is 
struck. He can go back to the heart, the reality of 
religion, but never to the assumptions of supernatu- 
ralism. Religion must square itself to a new rule in 
all his future acceptance. 

Man is not what he once was, and never can be 
again. The years of change and waiting under the 
influence of a new set of certainties have made over, 
not the real nature of the man, — for his needs and pos- 
sibilities spiritually are the same and indestructible, — 
but the mental constitution through which their satis- 
faction must come. Religion itself has met with no 
change, but man's capacity to receive it has been won- 
derfully affected. The possession is possible, as of 
old; but the approach has gained at the same time in 



Work and Want of the Nineteenth Century. 13 

dignity and difficulty. Man's hunger for inward com- 
fort and peace is not denied in the facts of science 
and history, but the old condition of satisfied want in 
the sweat of the brow is emphasized anew in the 
realm of religion. And the immense gain in the pos- 
sibility of firmly rooted convictions, instead of readily 
accepted although utterly impersonal faiths, has be- 
come the reward of the patient struggle. 

So much is certain: that, with all our boasted knowl- 
edge and our apparent prosperity, we are not happy. 
The age that allows in book form such questions as 
"Is Life worth living?" which comes out of a vast 
truth of experience, whatever may be the immediate 
end to which it appeals, is not an age satisfied and at 
rest. There are hunger and heartache at the core of 
life, such as indeed have always been there, but felt 
to-day with a new-found intensity and meaning. The 
want is no fancied one, no sign of an intellectual lux- 
uriousness sated with triumphs in the sphere of sense, 
but real and deep and humble with the direst needs 
of life. It is a mistake to suppose that mankind has 
grown away from the religious verities. Its very 
lapse from the falsity and unreason has been a positive 
step in the direction of the reality. But the retracing 
of steps amid a mighty forest of bewildering growths 
most naturally leads to a confusion of ways and a 
sense of being lost. There comes a time, however, 
when even forest paths are turned into highways for 
the world. 

Of all the people who think at all upon religious 
matters, we might make three distinct classes : those 



14 Ecce Spiritus. 

whose thought is traditional, whose minds are subject 
to certain modes of faith and feeling which obtain in 
the Church, as methods by which it impresses and 
holds its members; those who bring to bear upon 
religious problems nothing but purely rationalistic 
processes ; and those who stand between these two, 
the converts of neither, and yet indebted to each for 
a side to the completeness of their faith. 

Those of the first class ensconce themselves in a 
quiet corner of the Church, away from the din of the 
controversies which distract the age, but half -aware 
of, and in general indifferent to, the vast changes that 
have come here as elsewhere in the course of human 
development. The fact that others struggle and 
suffer, nay, even perish with despair, does not ruffle 
that mystical meditativeness and that satisfaction 
with artificial illumination which is only consistent 
with unwillingness to open one's windows to the 
light of day. With a mental constitution easily sat- 
isfied, a faith capacity naturally receptive and not 
too strongly dominated by the intellect, the nine- 
teenth century emphasizes in them no new needs. 
They are sometimes faintly stirred in their traditional 
security with the ripple of the stormy waves outside. 
Sometimes, they for a moment seem vaguely conscious 
of the bitter conflicts of the age, as they look in mild- 
eyed wonder at the phenomenon of a soul that is 
willing to be at peace, yet struggling with what to 
them seems a self-imposed necessity. The day is 
coming when even these will be shaken from their 
security, and will more than dream of the warfare of 



Work and Want of the Nineteenth Century. 15 

elements outside ; but at present there is little to be 
said that could hope to reach them, and this word 
does not especially have them in view. 

Those of the second class, shutting out all the calm 
fixities of the foregoing, stand at the other extreme, 
where no acknowledgment is made of any authority 
outside of matter and the mentality that is coexten- 
sive with it ; and, since with the faculties brought 
into use no other result is possible, they profess them- 
selves satisfied with the critical processes by which 
what is left to the reason alone is elaborated into 
intellectual fineness and proportion. Seeing clearly 
the impossibility of traditional methods of faith, and 
deprecating all positiveness in religious matters, they 
rest content in the nice processes of rationalization. 
An unconquerable distrust of finalities grows into a 
dread of dogmatism. With some hope still left of 
processes, they have only faithlessness of results. 
These latter are not yet, if ever; and, in a world of 
change, to think, to generalize, to skirt the heavens 
in only modest peepings at Promethean fire, is all 
that is consistent with the best spirit of the age. 

Between these two there is a class, never wholly 
absent, but of late growing in number and impor- 
tance, who count themselves satisfied with neither of 
the above positions. They are rationalistic in method 
and in sympathy with every negative result that has 
been wrought by the study of the facts, and yet un- 
willing and unable to rest there. With no fear of 
science and all due respect for its wonderful work 
of revelation, they are conscious of something in 



16 Ecce Spiritus. 

them more real in fact and more satisfactory in recog- 
nition, not yet accounted for. Whatever the failure 
of current Christianity to harmonize these two appar- 
ently antagonistic positions, they are not wholly with- 
out hope of a j)ossib]e meeting ground between faith 
and fact. As before said, this class is growing in 
number and importunateness of demand. Their po- 
sition is characteristic, in greater or less degree of 
acceptance, of a large proportion of earnest thinking 
people to-day all over the world. To these especially 
is the following word directed, in the hope that it 
may do at least something toward meeting the deep- 
est need of our time. 



CHAPTER n. 

SOURCES OF CHRISTIAN AUTHORITY. 

It is now understood that the essence of history, 
and especially that portion of it which has to do 
with the life and character of individual men, is 
that part of it which is least easily caught and made 
plain to others because of its independence of details. 
There is an illusive something in every personality 
which, while most readily felt, seems at best but to 
hover about the records of its life. It is there as the 
vital fact, and must be caught in at least some approx- 
imation, the degree of which latter will determine the 
truth and power of the transcription. We are grate- 
ful for the settings of experience, and all minor mat- 
ters of detail in their time and place ; but our real 
desire has to do not with the incidents and accidents, 
but with the man. Death or the distance of complex 
living have separated him from our loving regard, 
and we sigh for the nearer look of him who has made 
us hapjDier or better. It is the personal element that 
we miss, and which history sets itself about giving us. 
The very existence of historical attempt is a confes- 
sion of this object. It takes note of the fact that to 
know a man's works is not enough : they have only 
whetted our appetite to know him. Their highest 



18 Ecce Spiritus. 

office was the creation in us of that human attitude, 
which can only be satisfied with one more added to 
the nearer circle of friends. 

Biography is, moreover, a confession of the fact 
that in some sort its subject is alive, and that itself is 
to be the living impression of it to others. It cannot, 
then, be content with anything short of that which is 
essential and personal, as far as this is possible, in its 
presentation of the man. 

And especially is this true if the history have to do 
with one who lives below the surface of after time, 
affecting mankind not as an executive power, but as 
a subtle personal influence in all that it is or does. 
There are names which have a race quality, the his- 
tory of which is bound up largely in the conscious- 
ness and current living of the nations. They have a 
vitality, a potency to-day; and the biography which 
reaches our need must not merely outline, but make 
them live. 

Thus, the real history of Jesus is found, not only in 
the Gospels, but in that sum total of all the influences 
which as inspirations from him have been, and still 
are, shaping the world's thought and life. But there 
is a view of the Gospels in which they are seen to 
have succeeded in their biographical intent far better 
than we commonly think. In the matter of incident 
and detail, they may be faulty and unsatisfactory, and 
indeed their scantiness in this direction gives little 
positiveness of form to the outward picture of the 
man ; but in some subtle way, difficult to acquire and 
almost equally difficult to describe, they have affected 



Sources of Christian Authority. 19 

us with his personality, made clear to us the life that 
was in him, and, what is of yet more importance, 
given us a vivid impression of him as a still existent 
fact. They have answered the conditions of that 
higher history which has to do with, but is not 
wholly bounded by, the details. The crowning touch 
is seen in that motion and color which give life to the 
recital of dead facts. We rest our satisfaction in the 
Gospels, not in their fulness and literary finish, but in 
the man that seems to live and move in their graphic, 
though fragmentary, accounts. We think and care 
little about the books, being so stirred with this soul 
of the subject still speaking through them. Inasmuch 
as the literary element has subserved the living pur- 
pose, and in no wise stood in its way, we can but con- 
clude that the highest demands of history have been 
met in the Gospels. 

And no less, also, because they have not done too 
much, have not striven unduly to master the impres- 
sion for us. The Jesus we seek is there, but not too 
readily caught in the surface. He resides in and ani- 
mates the heart of the narrative, but only our best 
mood, our highest reach of intelligence, will find him. 
He will elude us, unless we are competent to read be- 
tween the lines. The gospel writers were not suffi- 
ciently skilled to more than construct the literary out- 
lines, from which the secret of Christian history will 
appear only when the keenly visioned and sympathetic 
mind approaches them. 

It must ever be that there is something central in 
every highly organized life, which does not easily re- 



20 JScce Spiritus. 

veal itself; and this will be true just in proportion to 
the intensity of the experience. The literary crafts- 
man can but hope at best to catch its essential feat- 
ures between the lines of his faithful work. The 
most searching and comprehensive analysis appears 
but the body, which some latent sensibility fills out 
with the motions of vitality. The Gospels might have 
been fuller and more specific, but we doubt if we 
should in that way have known more of Jesus. As 
yet little has come — so it often seems — from the 
outward record, but superficialness and that low sub- 
serviency to the letter, which Jesus himself so emphat- 
ically rebukes. The evident need is not so much one 
of greater external fulness, as of finer insight and 
ability to get below the surface on the part of those 
who read. Enough is there, to him who approaches 
the narrative with this equipment, to more than out- 
line the man. Beyond the statement of what he is 
and thinks, and the exemplification of this with which 
he lived before men, there is still left a personal re- 
siduum which is far truer to the man, as well as much 
more effective as a mover of mankind. 

That the results of gospel interpretation have not 
been hitherto altogether satisfactory is not because of 
any essential fault in the narratives themselves, but 
because of the imperfect attitude on the part of the 
student and would-be follower. The Gospels have 
utterly failed, if below their verbal inaccuracies and 
contradictoriness of detail they have not given us 
something which corrects and harmonizes them into a 
living picture and impersonation, — in short, the reality 



Sources of Christian Authority. 21 

of the Being of whom they treat. By this test we 
try them, convinced that their real exegesis is not 
textual, but intrinsic and spiritual. The last analysis 
of their collective statements is this : What character 
as a whole appears from the mass of incidents and 
accredited words, and is he, when so brought before 
us, a consistent, living, and efficient creation? Does 
he answer with the motions of vitality to the honest 
needs of mind and heart? Whatever may be the 
fault of the story, is the man clear and living, a pict- 
ure, nay, a person, not a dead fact? Does a heart 
with the currents of the life-blood in it come close to 
ours? Are our steps henceforth attended and our 
hands clasped in some nearness of spiritual compan- 
ionship ? 

The ages have with one voice answered this ques- 
tion, believers and unbelievers alike conceding that 
about the man there can be no shadow of doubt. In 
general, Jesus has never been far misunderstood. The 
character, personal superiority, and immense effective- 
ness of the man in the best thought and life of the 
world have gone unquestioned. Jesus has in great 
measure been spared the sufferings of so-called Chris- 
tianity at the hands of destructive criticism. Even 
the unsparing tests to which the literal claims of the 
Gospels themselves have been subjected have not 
touched the transcendent personality of the man, 
whom no false literalism and no perverted inference 
can hope to hold. Ecclesiastical assumption has been 
arraigned on every hand ; and the basis of Christianity, 
as it is seen to exist in its most authoritative utter- 



22 JSJcce Spiritus. 

ances, has been declared a myth. But the most ultra 
radicalism has been linked with respect for the man, 
and at least some faint understanding of him. 

Indeed, Jesus is the only part of Christianity that 
has not been underrated nor outgrown. In the inter- 
ests of schemes and systems, his utterances have been 
a thousand times mutilated, the schools themselves, 
never stationary, having frequently shifted the basis 
of Biblical interpretation ; and all the time the Jesus 
of human history has stood out as an object of rever- 
ence and study alike to Christians and critics. It is 
here, then, that the real gospel begins and ends. The 
man is the gospel. He tests and measures the record. 
The real exegesis is in the application of the character 
to the context. It is he that inspired the statements, 
it is he alone that with any clearness and consistency 
comes out of them to-day. The texts do not prove 
the life principle which he announced, but the princi- 
ple proves the texts. There are no contradictions in 
the character. In its wholeness, all differences of in- 
terpretation disappear. The churches have been built 
up on the conrprehension of a single side ; hence the 
necessity for many churches. The Gospels are the 
work of different men, and hence individual. But 
Jesus is one, and no consistent Christianity will ap- 
proach him from any stand-point of partiality. His 
principle of life is one, and fails utterly, if it allows 
any difference except in the progressive appreciation 
of men. 

Textual Christianity is giving way to the Chris- 
tianity of spirit, which asks not what is the result of 



Sources of Christian Authority. 23 

this text pitted against that, but what, between and 
beyond them all, is the real, the essentially true Jesus; 
and then what is the gist, the outcome of his peculiar 
genius, — the spirit, not the letter of his message. The 
records have so fully done their work that they have 
given us something truer and more consistent than 
themselves. This spirit not only inspired them in the 
beginning, but in the end will be seen to be the only 
power that can save them. Their sufferings at the 
hands of criticism have only been the foretaste of a 
yet wider defection in popular acceptance ; and either 
the heart of them must be newly understood and in- 
sisted upon, or they will fall utterly from their high 
position of usefulness and regard. The question must 
be asked, What remains to-day, in the light of all 
destructive facts, still true and saving? What is 
there that is perennial in them, that no criticism can 
touch ? If they include nothing but what scholar- 
ship can undermine, we may well substitute our 
understanding in place of their outgrown signifi- 
cance. 

This inner meaning and message will be found to 
reside in their wholeness rather than in their separate 
facts ; in the man they present and his completeness 
rather than in the partialness of any statement, how- 
ever impressive, which stands by itself. Christianity 
is a great deal truer than the Gospels, as any soul is 
truer than the body in which it resides. It antedated 
and will outlast them. It is the very work of Chris- 
tianity to get the gospel into universal consciousness ; 
and, when this shall have been accomplished, the out- 



24 Ecce Spiritus. 

wvrd record will receive a new preciousness and dig- 
nity. It is not so much the books that support Chris- 
tianity, as it is Christianity that supports the books. 

Without, then, bringing any learned exegesis to 
bear upon the textual side of Christianity, we may 
claim to have studied the man of the Gospels in sym- 
pathetic reverence for him and his truth as therein 
revealed. We have been able to see how the gospel 
writers have given more than they intended, written 
deeper than they knew, and how, by that authority 
which is not in and of themselves, the records reveal 
that which contravenes all their possible error and 
falsity. We go to Jesus to prove the textual verity 
of any given passage, gauging its accuracy and sin- 
cerity by the consistent wholeness of his character, 
which no variations in the narrative have ever com- 
promised. When we see him, we learn of the short- 
sightedness and superstition of his historians, who, 
while everywhere honest and devoted, are so placed 
toward the vast suggestiveness of his principle of life 
as to be unable wholly to escajDe a narrowness of in- 
sight and statement, which no one was so quick to 
notice and rebuke as Jesus himself. It was this in 
them that so grieved and disappointed him through 
life, and especially in those last trying experiences 
which so severely tested the quality of their appre- 
ciation. 

Nevertheless, it is not possible for them to wholly 
distort the truth of such as he. It yet remained his 
truth, not theirs. Their honesty gave us the man, 
while their distance from his exalted stand-point pre- 



Sources of Christian Authority. 25 

rented them from always giving accurate estimates of 
his words. They labored as they could, not only con- 
scientiously, but adequately. It is not in the j)ower 
of man to put the life of such as he into perfect 
statement; nor was it, so far as we can see, in the plan 
of Providence to thus relieve future generations of 
any part to do in the saving work. It is there in suf- 
ficient fulness, but not unless ice are prepared to find 
it. A perfect record had not made a perfect Christi- 
anity, which is not an intellectual statement, but a 
living power. It is here, not for acquiescence, but for 
stimulation. There is a logic which puts the mind at 
rest, but that utterance is better than logical which 
stirs the soul to life and effort. 

With this view of the Scripture record, we shall 
gain nothing by assuming the position that in one pas- 
sage Jesus teaches his Godhead, while his crowning 
and essential manhood is asserted in the next. We 
cannot mistake him and the great drift of his thought 
and life. We send the characteristic principle he ex- 
emplifies through the complex statements, like a ray 
of light shot through confusing ways, and learn every- 
where of a pinnacle Humanity, so reaching up to and 
touching Deity as to transcend the narrow significance 
of either claim. It is useless to replace one literalism 
with another, to disprove one text by its neighbor. 
Each is true, but there is something truer than them 
all, — the man and his spirit as their aggregate out- 
come. This spirit tone of his uncaught and transcen- 
dent message, this life power and life drift, every- 
where setting away from the verbal landmarks and as 



26 Ecce Spiritus. 

law abiding in its operation as it is illimitable in its 
sweep, is the gift and glory of Christianity. 

The Gospels will continue to be loved and honored; 
but their place will still further shift in the estimation 
of mankind, when they shall be no longer held as a 
blind guide or a delusive authority. They will then 
be blessed as the imperfect vehicle of a vast influence 
which lives below their cunning in the suggestiveness 
of their lines. And as we do not exalt the canvas, 
but the S23eaking face and form ingrained in its mean- 
ingless texture, so it is the man of wholeness we re- 
gard, and not the ^>sei^o-sacred books. They have 
done a mighty work, but the real Christ has got be- 
yond their keeping. Destroy them, if we might, we 
could not touch the spirit which has already become 
a race possession. 

Jesus has been born into universal consciousness, 
and has become part of our very intuitions. Heredi- 
tary prepossession, transmitted education, and all 
atmospheric and unconscious influences that do so 
much to shape the thought and animate the heart of 
living, confess him. He is largely instinctive with us 
now. Whether we will or no, there is something of 
him still left in our mental and spiritual constitution. 
Nor need we fear that the world will ever lose Jesus. 
Its service may be for a long time outward, or its in- 
sistence upon such service be altogether given up ; but 
it can no more eliminate him from human conscious- 
ness than it can destroy life itself. The world is fast 
losing its respect for the many who have come in his 
name, and in his name taught many false doctrines; 



Sources of Christian Authority. 27 

but Jesus continues to dominate the motives that color 
and control the entire outlook and inlook of humanity. 

But, beyond this, there is that in the Gospels, taken 
verse by verse, before which no wise and consistent 
Christian philosophy need acknowledge its powerless- 
ness. With the principle in our minds which Jesus 
everywhere insists irpon and applies, there is really 
no contradictoriness in their separate versions. The 
minute Jesus is understood, the Gospels grow plain. 
Nor is there anything illogical in this precedence of 
the subject over the story. Their harmony is not in 
and of themselves, intellectually considered, but in the 
spirit that lives below every line of their writing. 

It is frequently said the Bible proves one thing as 
well as another, and hence the growing disregard of 
the creeds as possessing any peculiar authority, — a dis- 
regard which goes deeper than appears, since it affects 
the real allegiance of even those who outwardly con- 
fess them. If this objection be valid, it is more fatal 
to any claim of authoritative utterance on the part of 
the New Testament than we commonly think. Either 
the Gospels must stand clear of this charge, or they 
will fall, as indeed they seem to be falling, from popu- 
lar credence and regard. If it be true that they sub- 
stantiate one theory as well as another, then is it true 
that they authoritatively teach nothing. If one 
credal statement is as truly based on Scripture as an. 
other, then are the Gospels nothing but a do-all for 
the churches, and the groundwork for denominational 
efficacy. In such a case, one sect is as valuable as an- 
other, and none of them of more than very limited 
importance. 



28 JEcce Spiritus. 

There can be no half-way position in this matter. 
Either the Gospels teach something, something defi- 
nite, certain, and consistent, or they teach nothing. 
Reasoning people are coming wisely to insist upon 
this as a fundamental condition of their acceptance, 
and, in the failure of agreement, on the part of those 
who profess to consider them saving, as to what this 
something definite is, are concluding that their claim 
is mythical. 

It seems plain from the history of the past, which 
has only illustrated successive attempts to demon- 
strate this on the basis of separate passages, that it 
can only be shown from the record as a whole, re- 
garded in the light of its consistent spirit rather than 
of its varying letter. One unmistakable thought, pur- 
pose, principle, must furnish the ground for their 
authority. When seen in the light of this, their con- 
tradictoriness disappears. They remain flexible in 
application, but absolute in expression. Their inspi- 
rational claim rests on that which unites and harmo- 
nizes them, and will attest itself in the faiths newly 
built up around them ; while in nothing will it be so 
far disproved as in the position which bases this claim 
upon the perception of one side of the vast truth they 
convey. The Gospels stand or fall by themselves, nor 
need we unduly exercise ourselves with the question 
of their special inspiration. That they are inspired 
is certain, but it is with the honesty and mighty im- 
port of the facts. They will never become plain and 
consistent until they are measured by the spirit, the 
life, and principle of Jesus, which was their inspira- 



Sources of Christian Authority. 29 

tion, and remains the key to all their conclusions. 
Then their contradictions will resolve themselves into 
complemental parts of one stupendous truth, as broad 
as the being and possibility of man, and as high as 
eternal Wisdom and Love. 

While not the property of the Gospels, Jesus yet 
owns them in their integrity as stepping-stones into 
human consciousness. That human consciousness is 
to-day the great revealer of the Master, who has 
countless historians. Nor can he fall by any Script- 
ural inaccuracies. He profits by the very ingen- 
uousness of the gospel writers, which transforms 
their short-sightedness into supreme honesty. In 
their essential integrity, they have given us the 
man they did not understand, but not alone the man 
of their misapprehension. Side by side with the 
ignorance and error goes the rebuke with which he 
met their want of appreciation. It was the ache 
and sorrow of Jesus' life that they confronted with 
bald literalism every utterance of higher philosophy, 
every statement of spiritual truth he ever made. It 
was his keenest pang in the bitterness of death that 
even the nearer few had failed to know him as he was. 

But all this was well, since the writers did not hesi- 
tate to give us the rebuke side by side with the gross 
misconcej^tion. They have impressed the man upon 
us, even if every inference that they made from him 
was false, in giving him just as he was, not wholly 
their misunderstood Jesus, but the one who corrected 
and shamed them. That was all we could in reason 
ask of them, and all they could by any possibility 
give. 



30 JEcce Spiritus. 

The Gospels are simple records of simple men, more 
impressed with than able always to comprehend the 
person and principle of which they treat. In truth, 
they make little obvious effort to understand Jesus. 
There is frequent questioning, but almost no attempt 
at systematic study or appreciation. They are only a 
favored few of an expectant nation who are at the 
outset prepared to reverence much they cannot com- 
prehend in so exalted a being. They neither dog- 
matize nor sum up, but simply relate the incidents 
and state the facts as best they might. They loved 
him no less, but more, for what was beyond their 
power of intellectual or spiritual sympathy ; for were 
they not subject to his wonderful personal influence, 
as well as dominated by the strength of a race idea ? 
Was he not pure, mighty, magnetic, unselfish? Was 
he not the prince of friends ? They bowed before 
him, served and followed in his train, not because they 
fully understood him, but because he was an object of 
deep and distant wonder. Awe stood in the place of 
understanding. They spare neither their questions 
nor their surprise. They nowhere catch the full drift 
and inclusiveness of his thought. But few in number, 
and suspected by the powers that were, his disciples 
followed him with a faith capacity that centuries 
of waiting had brought out into intense st activity. 
When at last he had come, it was as one strange and 
incomprehensible, building a different kingdom from 
that of which they had dreamed, but infinitely lovely 
and unmistakably grand. 

Accurate and exhaustive critical work was not to 



Sources of Christian Authority. 31 

have been expected in the books which came out of 
the same race spirit, the same intensity of national 
thought and life, out of which as an environment 
sprang Jesus himself. For with all his peculiar an- 
tagonisms to Jewish law and formalism, Jesus, in that 
extreme sensibility and impressionableness of his nat- 
ure, in that clear-seeing faculty and that strong self- 
centred bearing of his, was the natural outcome, the 
typical representative, of the most individual nation 
earth ever saw. This " peculiar people," unitized in 
life and race characteristics, with a firm faith in a 
special God origin and a sacred history, living in an 
almost daily realization of a common hope, could not 
but have been the loins out of which should spring 
the representative, not of their own narrowness, but 
of the best possibility of humanity. Jesus was the 
product of race sentiment, yearning, and aspiration. 
A deep under-current of popular protest, of spiritual 
instincts demanding recognition and enlightenment, 
had dictated that age-long anticipation of a Messiah. 
This had grown out of common want to a national 
faith. The universal need called for a representative. 
It was a race law, a race necessity, that he must come 
as the natural crown and culmination of its life. The 
feeling, the expectation, is abroad everywhere, — in 
the temple, the home, the very atmosphere. The 
mothers share it in a peculiar sense. Women are 
very sensitive to certain sides of political life ; and, 
while never the broadest, they are often the intensest 
of politicians. They get together and dwell upon this 
tender hope of a restorer of the nation's life, until 



32 Ecoe Spiritus. 

some one is found rightly constituted and situated to 
incorporate it into the structure of her own changing 
system, stamping the mind and character of the off- 
spring she bears with the intense longing of the peo- 
ple, in which she herself shares, moulding and shaping 
its nature to the white heat of her own passionate 
devotion to the national idea. 

Out of this strong and reverent faith came the ready 
response on the part of his followers to the call of 
Jesus. Out of this spirit, the writings were conceived 
in the minds of men vacillating between the old in- 
stinctive faith and the strange personality of the man 
who at the same time moved and bewildered them. 
But this did not too greatly trouble them ; for were 
they not there to follow, to serve, above all to learn ? 
How imperfectly they grasped the situation is often 
seen ; how sincere and practically sufficient the record 
they left as frequently appears. A superficial Chris- 
tianity sprang up, but the hard shell enclosed the 
vital germ. It has been there, as a sort of later sal- 
vation, ever since, developing in the best life of the 
Church ; from time to time, correcting its abuses and 
shaming its falsity, until out of much progress the 
deathless principle comes to light again, to be known 
for what it is. Not only is it now permitted out- 
wardly, but it is also inwardly possible to state anew 
the unspent spirituality of Jesus. 

The books have weakened in their hold : priest and 
ritual in popular estimation have lost their saving 
sanctity. Yet nothing has touched with the hint of 
incaj)acity the name and power of Jesus, except want 



Sources of Christian Authority. 33 

of understanding on the part of those who profess to 
represent him. Again, an era of fresh, free religious 
life succeeds the ages of formalism and subserviency 
to dead letter. Again, the times await the Messiah, 
promised of old, but not yet wholly come. In the 
wilderness of our later Jordan, we wait to welcome 
him who comes with healing on his lips. 



CHAPTER III. 

NATURAL OR SUPERNATURAL. 

When we consider the source of the peculiar power 
which Jesus exercised, we are led into a wide field of 
search. The suggestiveness of his life takes us out 
into the broad expanse of nature, as well as into the 
loftiest reach of spirituality. There is nothing that 
we can leave out of the account, when we consider the 
sources from which he derives the material of his 
thought. It is a case of the broadest and keenest 
sympathies. His disciples themselves seem to have 
regarded him from the stand-point of their Jewish 
predilections alone, linking him back by their local 
and traditional thought to the lineal prophets of the 
race. At first, he was to them one who should restore 
the fading splendors of their people; afterward, he 
was a new strange potency which entered into their 
life and swayed them beyond their understanding and 
will. 

But this inference of the Gospels, which sees only 
the traditional side of Jesus' origin, finds no sympathy 
at his hands. At the very outset, he denied any par- 
ticipation in the old Jewish idea of his origin, and 
ever afterward went so far contrary to the popular 
faith and expectation as to render himself as much an 



Natural or Supernatural. 35 

enemy in the estimation of his own people as in that 
of the Roman government. It was to flee the distrust 
and opposition he met among his own family and 
from his neighbors in Nazareth that he passed into 
the freer air of Capernaum. Here there was less of 
this conscious necessity of looking backward, and 
more readiness to accept the truth of to-day. The 
earliest record of his doings at the age of twelve 
indicates a strangely sceptical attitude in one so 
young, and a premature ability not only to question, 
but to answer, the finalities of Hebrew doctrine. 
Manifestly there was no disposition on his part, 
even as early as this, to identify himself with the 
course of traditional thought. Nor does the subse- 
quent development of his personality bring him any 
nearer to the popular expectation. He uses and 
regards the Scriptures from a twofold stand-point, 
showing himself keenly alive to their poetic and lit- 
erary worth, and ever willing to take advantage of 
their already assured impressiveness to bring his own 
truths home to men's minds. There is no exclusive- 
ness in his thought : it is ready to accept the attesta- 
tion even of a set of doctrines which have been for 
the most part outgrown. But he is careful to say, 
"It is written in your law," not my law, nor even 
our law, but in yours. He participates in all truth, 
but shares in the sacredness ascribed to no narrow 
formulation. 

Jesus refuses to be localized. He owns no nation- 
ality, confines his followers to no section, sending 
them unto all nations. He was born with the race 



36 Ecce Spiritus. 

feeling, a fellow of mankind, with humanity at his 
heart. He is conscious of no prophet-descent, no 
lineal obligations to preconceived ideas. It is God- 
descent that fills his consciousness, responsibility to 
One alone, and that his Father. It is the new wine 
and the new cloth with him, and he stands clear of 
patched garments and old bottles. The entire drift 
of his mind, as well as the expressions of his peculiar 
principle in its vast application, show that originality 
characterizes that wonderful possibility of being which 
not only made him so great, but resulted in the end- 
less cycles of his most exalted influence upon man- 
kind. It is not necessary in the light of his consistent 
thought and life to trace his lineage back to David, or 
base his power upon the Isaiahn prophecies. Jewish 
history is the record of a vast preparation, an inten- 
sity of race life and longing out of which it was 
necessary that he should come. Further than this we 
need not go, since the mother that gave him birth 
refused him sustenance, and, indeed, from the earliest 
days of his maturity knew him not. It is not always 
the physical parents who deserve the child's regard, 
nor who claim the child's allegiance. The foster 
mother, who bears the growing life, in the womb of 
a daily wisdom and tenderness, through the period 
of most critical change, is nearer than the natural 
parent who only brings forth to curse and to neglect. 
It was well that Judea rejected him. Thus at the 
outset was he denationalized, and became the world's 
possession. It was, moreover, in the line of the en- 
tire plan and purpose of Jesus' life, which was a com- 



Natural or Supernatural. 37 

plete subjugation of the outward to the inward. It 
put the emphasis at once on that other nearer birth, 
which had to do with his coming into the conscious- 
ness and exercise of spiritual power, and which he so 
often refers to as the one necessary condition of sal- 
vation. The physical birthright becomes abortive, is 
ignored, and made of none effect on every side, in 
order that the real man, the one who thought and 
wrought and suffered and triumphed from an entirely 
new stand-point, might be the more prominent. It is 
this that he means when he speaks of himself, differ- 
ing radically from those around him in his estimate 
of the make-up of personality. 

Consider him on any other side than this, and he 
becomes vague and unsatisfactory. He is the most 
illusive and impersonal of all great historic characters ; 
never egotistic, and utterly unrelated to his fellows 
in the ordinary conditions by which personality loves 
to exercise and complete itself. From any common 
stand-point, the human interest is entirely wanting in 
his life. He neither loved as other men love, nor 
married, nor lived in his children, nor endured the 
supreme tests of the home. In political and social 
life, he gave no answer to the great demands that in 
every age call out the highest practical and moral 
gifts. He was impersonal everywhere, except where 
most men are the merest human abstractions. In 
the higher spiritual prerogative, they are hardly more 
than pale reflections of that which in Jesus was robust 
and vital. His spiritual personality was so intense 
and vigorous that, with the force of the mission that 



38 Ecce Spiritus. 

early laid its hand upon him, he had room in his 
short life for nothing else. The first expression of 
his mind of which we have any record, the expres- 
sion of what would commonly be considered a boy, 
but which in this case indicates the serious caste of a 
mature and already preoccupied soul, is, "Wist ye not 
that I must be about my father's business?" There 
and then, in the already denationalized Jewish boy, 
was born the Jesus of humanity. The intense spirit- 
ual life — absorbing the entire realm of material things 
as a mere contingent and accessory of his present 
existence, closely and consciously related to the su- 
preme source and centre of being, God, and alone 
bent on the higher welfare of a world grovelling in 
the literalism of sense — had become not the posses- 
sion, but the very personality of Jesus. As such, he 
shines out unmistakably in the Gospels. The man is 
intangible, vague, perhaps unsatisfactory. This Jesus 
lives consistently in all, harmonizing every seeming 
difficulty and establishing the substantial genuineness 
of the record beyond a reasonable doubt. 

We perceive here at once the presence of some- 
thing so unique and individual in the make-up of the 
man as to lead us again to ask as to the peculiarity in 
kind, the nature of the power, on which Jesus rested 
his independence. If he could stand outside of all 
traditional sanctity, whence came his prerogative, and 
the consciousness of it, so all-sufficient in him ? 

A glance at the wholly inadequate position of the 
Church in this matter will give us the negative side to 
the answer. Starting with the assumption that man 



Natural or Supernatural. 39 

was inherently, or by transmitted disobedience, de- 
praved, it has necessitated the introduction of some 
striking and unusual element in the scheme of salva- 
tion. In the first trial of life, the race tested the 
method of nature and found it a failure. Creation on 
its natural side turned out to be faulty and insuffi- 
cient. God saw His mistake, and essayed to complete 
His half-way work by an intervention. The universe 
had never been anything but a thing of law, but law 
He pronounced a failure. It was large enough for all 
other purposes in the life and surroundings of man, 
but had not included and could not include the sal- 
vation of the race. Consequently, God entrenched 
Himself in the resource of an arbitrarily constituted 
being who should institute an entirely new order of 
things, and became the type of a great lawlessness. 
Nature was wrong, ineffective, — nay, worse, — foul 
and sinful. To complete and save it, there must be 
the interposition of supernatural efficacy. 

Certain it is that such a theory, however service- 
able in the early centuries before even a Luther had 
come, cannot satisfy the enlightened thought of to-day. 
It puts itself fatally outside the beautiful cycle of law 
which the modern mind, having once seen in the uni- 
verse, will never again give up, though all the systems 
of theology fail. It is, moreover, as inconsistent with 
the sense and spirit of Jesus' life as it is with the en- 
tire tendency of modern thought. It cannot serve us 
any longer ; and the attempt to enforce it only results 
in the blank atheism and unchurched indifference, the 
practical dechristianizing and want of spirituality so 
characteristic of our time. 



40 Ecce Spiritus. 

One thing is fixed and certain : the religion which 
gains any acceptance now and henceforth among think- 
ing people must be in harmony with, nay, based upon 
and a very part of that system of perfect and un- 
changeable law which is not only everywhere seen in 
the universe, but is also seen to be the fittest type of 
God's being and providence. It is the God of nature 
men seek, not the supernatural abrogator in religion of 
the laws he has instituted everywhere else. With such 
a being, they have hope of understanding and of being 
themselves understood. They know and reverence 
law, and by no stretch of the imagination can they 
reverence anything that would deny its evidently 
divine function. Religion they want, and would 
have, — but not if it contravenes the facts of that 
part of God's creation of which we already know; not 
if it must, infant-like, play hide and seek behind the 
worn-out entrenchments of superstition and unreason. 
In such a case, the age has only one answer to make. 
It will give up the suppositions of religion sooner than 
renounce the facts of science. It knows of the latter, 
and cannot well afford to give up certainty for uncer- 
tainty. Science has been of late so busily at work 
unearthing God, that the Church, unwilling to acknowl- 
edge or accept its results, has been driven to make a 
wider gulf between itself and thinking people in the 
restatement of beliefs which, while honest once, are 
inexcusable now. Certain facts exist ; and, whatever 
else falls, they must remain. Creative force is the 
rigid and uncompromising expression of law-abiding 
instincts, and creative personality in all its relations 



Natural or Supernatural. 41 

with the created must of necessity be the same. If 
religion is to run in harmony with this, and be as 
much a product of natural law as the veriest material 
procedure, it not only will not at the outset excite 
distrust, but will appeal to just those faculties which 
in this age have supremest activity and inspire most 
universal confidence. It will not be the product of 
reason in this age any more than it has been in any 
other, but it will be so peculiarly reasonable that no 
objection and no want of respect shall come from that 
at present authoritative quarter. There is no opposi- 
tion to spirituality, except so far as it is baseless and 
contradictory of known facts. But if it can be shown 
to be natural, law-abiding in the same sense in which 
the universe is, and in harmony with, not opposed to 
and nugatory of the facts that science has revealed, 
the age not only can accept, but is hungry for it. 

It will be for our future consideration to see how 
nature and spirit agree, nay, at least in one of their 
aspects, are one and the same thing, so that there is 
not only no opposition between natural and spiritual, 
but perfect sympathy and accord. Suffice it now to 
assert that such a religion as above described, as the 
only one possible in our time, is found in that of 
Jesus, and to show one of the aspects in which it is 
an eminently natural and not a supernatural product. 
TTe refer now simply to its origin, the order out of 
which it came, whether that of preconceived and prov- 
idential law, instituted in the beginning and made a 
part of the very structure and condition of things, or 
unrelated to law and interventional, supernatural in 



42 Ecce Spiritus. 

the sense of transcending in its coming all the known 
methods of God's working. 

Observe that we say the religion of Jesus, and not 
Christianity; and yet there is no possible objection to 
the word, if Jesus, and not the intervening ages of 
theological distortion, be allowed to fill out its mean- 
ing. For Jesus draws his peculiar environment from 
as fine a natural selection, as pure a succession of law, 
as any development of life within the scope of scientific 
observation. No statement could be simpler nor more 
readily accepted than that life, as we know it, is an 
ascending and descending* scale between the two ex- 
tremes of moral and spiritual attainment, tending in 
graded steps, now toward some typical and irresist- 
ible virtue, and now toward some representative evil. 
Thus, in general, men are neither very good nor very 
bad. The mass of mankind are within the circle of a 
conflicting allegiance, and not in any sense represent- 
atives of either of the moral extremes. We say that 
every person has at least a latent possibility of good, 
and in general none are so consistent in their virtue 
as to prevent the appearance of frequent imperfection. 
And yet there is very manifest variation in the bal- 
ance of tendencies in different individuals and classes 
of society, the law establishing that the goodness or 
badness of no two shall exactly coincide, each one 
differing a shade in worth or degradation from his 
neighbor. In some, the balance is nicely kept, and 
neither virtue nor vice wholly gains the ascendancy. 
In others, enough good predominates to warrant the 
general title of virtuous, or enough vice intervenes to 



Natural or Supernatural, 43 

stamp the character with a decidedly unwholesome 
taint. But, in general, such distinctions are very- 
vague and of only relative importance. 

It is evident that the law, ever one in the total of 
experience, and with an aggregate that never varies 
except in the slowly ascending ratio of man's progres- 
sive development, allows, we had almost said necessi- 
tates, this spiritual individuality in some large view 
of the purposes of life. But it is also evident that 
the law cannot stop here in its complete working. It 
has provided for the ordinary necessities of an experi- 
ence which transcends the physical, and cannot be 
shown to be perfect until it has gone further, and in- 
cluded beyond its limitations an extreme expression 
which shall show the fullest possibilities of life. The 
variation in either direction must lead us out to 
representative character. Down among the immoral 
growths there must be one who shows the possible 
limits to which human depravity can sink. There 
must be one lower than all the rest, more hopeless 
than whom no man can ever be. It is not our prov- 
ince to decide who that revealer of unregenerateness 
may be, since here our means of knowledge of the 
comparative sort are few and scanty. Men have not 
troubled themselves with the nice question of relative 
moral littleness. History has merely outlined the 
picture, at which mankind shudders and turns away 
in loathing. It is of no consequence whether the un- 
enviable palm be accorded a Judas, a Nero, a Caligula, 
a Duke of Alva, or a Henry VIII. Suffice it to say 
that somewhere on that low plane exists one more ut- 



44 Ecce Sjnritus. 

terly without good than his fellows, one who stands 
type and symbol of all to which human badness can 
attain. 

By the same law, just as the race declines on a 
nicely adjusted scale to such representative sinners, 
by an equally fine gradation it ascends through the 
philanthropic and saintly names to some pinnacle 
character, some instance of phenomenal attainment in 
the region of the good. In stricter language, these 
are the limits within which the law of life expresses 
itself. With all the freedom of the individual, and 
any changes that might be made in the moral stand- 
ard, there must be a worst and a best, a sufficient 
warning and an inspiration out of the actualities of 
life in their natural evolution adequate to all the 
needs of life. The representative Good must be the 
fulfilment of the law which includes and necessitates 
the struggle and final conquest of man. The condi- 
tions of life into which he is born surround him with 
a spiritual environment of baffling necessities, unsatis- 
fied longings, and illusive ideals. The law of his 
being gave him these, but did not, could not, stop 
here. It had one crowning representative expression, 
which gave him, whatever the degree of his indi- 
vidual endowment, that which his limitations lacked. 
If he were in any sense lost, either by nature or per- 
sonal neglect, in the midst of this environment into 
which he was born, then the same conditions must 
furnish him a saviour. We are bound in the law of 
being for good and bad, but never beyond the fact of 
a possible deliverance. That which limits must per- 
force furnish a way out into fulness. 



Natural or Supernatural. 45 

This is a condition of nature, as we commonly un- 
derstand the word, a part of the very structure of 
things, not new, not interventional, but a side of the 
necessity that was seen in creation. It is a law just 
as positive and certain as that of gravitation, and 
brings us to our spiritual Saviour with no strain nor 
stretch of strictly natural symbols. It is just as truly 
the provision of God for his children, the expression 
of that loving foresight which in the beginning, at 
the very inception of things, not only ordained life, 
but so conditioned it that it should of its own neces- 
sity be brought back to him. Salvation was no after- 
thought of the Almighty. If there were any elements 
of estrangement in the conditions into which man 
came, neither the law nor its Creator could have been 
just, and left out of its fixities the means of reconcili- 
ation and restoration. Such a revelation, a part of 
fact and the very order and completeness of nature, 
we can understand. It derogates in no degree from 
our respect for God, — a respect learned in a universe 
of most wonderful elaborateness and reliability, and 
appeals at once to our confidence and comprehension. 
While violating in no slightest ]3 articular the facts or 
the order of nature, it is a most beautiful and tender 
illustration of the fatherly care of the Creator. Re- 
ligion can ask for no grander proof of a providential 
and beneficent government than this. There is no 
clinging weakness and no honest want that cannot 
shelter itself under such a conception. 

Nothing has been more grossly misunderstood than 
the idea of God's providence. A low, poor word has 



46 JEJcce Sp>iritus. 

vitiated its sublime import, by taking it out of the 
sphere of law. It has been linked with special, and 
negatived altogether. Providence is a seeing before; 
a foresight, not an afterthought ; an anticipation, not 
an intervention. There is, and can be, no special 
providence where all is providential, and has been so 
from the earliest creation of an all-wise God. He 
p?*o-\ide& for all his creatures in the establishment of 
laws which, in their inevitable working, included the 
conditions of his possible salvation. There can be 
no providence outside of this, nor is one needed. 
God does his work wisely and well, and will not avail 
himself of any of our suggestions or corrections. It 
was all right in the beginning, and will be in the end. 

Nor is it true that the honest human heart asks for 
itself any more than this. We can well be content 
with a forethought that resides in the very inception 
of things ; we can well rest in a providence so much 
older even than our history, as tireless as creation 
itself, and far more consoling than the idea of a God 
who intercepts law for our especial benefit. There 
can be no sadness in this thought, nothing that wars 
against human joy in effort and attainment. There is 
blessedness everywhere in man's adaptation to God's 
law. There is no blessedness outside of this ; and for 
want of it is all the ache and incompleteness, the 
despair of life. 

When we look for this highest outcome of our race 
possibilities, w T e have not far to go. That Jesus stands 
in that position will be a matter of doubt to almost 
none. Any scepticism which touches him has refer- 



Natural or Supernatural. 47 

ence solely to the supernatural claims put forth for 
him by his followers ; but men most radical, most pro- 
fessedly outside the pale of Christian fellowship, agree 
in reverence for the man. He was good, — utterly, 
unmistakably good. He was radiantly pure, grandly 
unselfish, uncompromisingly true. What more can 
we ask in our pinnacle character ? Without any un- 
due Christian bias, we can say of him that he is a man 
of men. Taken simply as a product of history, one of 
the great names among many, there are at least none 
greater in goodness than he. 

But he is more, infinitely more than this, as we 
shall see later on, alike in his providential character 
and his strict truthfulness to nature. He is in all 
respects the highest possibility of man, touching, nay 
exhausting, ranges of being that transcend even the 
moral. The fever and stress of life, its joy and sor- 
row, are caught up in him and there find their har- 
mony and completeness. But ever in the fulness of 
his prerogative he remains humanity's representative 
by no supernatural, no especially divine endowment ; 
a creature of no interrupted law, but an embodiment 
of life's best in being and possibility provided for in 
the necessary conditions of the race. 

We do not need to go outside of law to find him. 
Whenever we come to human history in its whole- 
ness, we shall be sure to meet him in his antipodal 
virtue, completing the long line of spiritual develop- 
ment which begins in the polar depravity of a Nero. 
He is a race necessity, provided for in the beginning, 
included in a law so perfect that it needed no inter- 



48 JEcce Spiritus. 

vention ; a revelation out of man's own loins of the 
God that first breathed in him the breath of life, and 
was never more to be a fact wholly separate from 
him. 



CHAPTER IV. 



CHRISTIAN POWER. 



With the question as to the source of Christian 
power answered, that as to its specific nature conies 
next in order. It has already been said that Jesus 
stands representative of the sum total of man's highest 
possible attainment, but the statement will not at first 
thought be fully understood. According to the esti- 
mate of the man will be the conception of what is 
highest for him ; and here it is evident that Jesus 
differed from those about him, as well as from a large 
class of thinkers to-day. When the phrase "greatest 
of men " is used, there are many who mean nothing 
by it but man with reference to his power to think, 
to organize, and to execute. The great intellectual, 
artistic, and mechanical triumphs are their measure 
of the man, that which in their minds links him 
closest to the vast intelligence that originates and 
orders in the sphere of the universe. 

The fact remains, however, that there is something 
of man back of this, which is more truly himself 
and more genuinely powerful than the exercise of 
any merely intellectual faculty. For instance, a man 
recombines crude elements of power, which were 
before meaningless, so that now some wonderful me- 



50 Ecce Spiritus. 

chanical result is attained. Manifestly there is some- 
thing godlike in this leading where others only follow, 
in this co-ordinating power, akin to that by which 
God works, which gives him this strange mastery 
over cause and effect. But after we have exhausted 
the wonder, the beauty, or the use of his creation, 
and come back to the man himself, we find that, great 
as was his invention, he himself was infinitely greater. 
The machine is no measure of the man. He made 
it, and something else made him what he was, as 
seen in that creative possibility. The mechanical 
ingenuity was subordinate to that in the man which 
enabled him to wait and struggle, which sustained 
him with hope and armed him with courage. No 
one compasses anything that is not less than himself; 
and, although his mind might have conceived of the 
machine, his hand never could have carried it through 
to perfection, in the face of countless obstacles, with- 
out that something back of it which was more truly 
himself than the mechanical skill. The world must 
first be indebted to him for what he was, before it 
could have any occasion to thank him for what he did. 
The last outcome of the man is personal, and the 
person is jnore than a set of faculties. He presides 
over, resides in these, but is no one of them, nor all 
of them taken together; but some aggregate and out- 
come of separate functions become One, regnant, and 
personal. As himself, he is a power far back of any 
cunning he can put into the dead possibility of iron 
and steel. When you have found him, you begin to 
know something of the real potency which did not 



Christian Power. 51 

so much create, as inspire and make creation possible. 
You feel that he cannot be identified with his power 
to do, any more than God can be confounded with 
that which he has created ; that, when you name him, 
you name some power of being beyond all the expres- 
sions, however mighty, of his originating faculties. 
Out of these in their separateness, the man is some- 
thing individual and entire, seen in each, and yet 
more than all. 

In other words, the man is spiritual. The last 
analysis of that which is most peculiar and personal 
and essential about him is spirituality. This, also, is 
his highest outcome and measurement. This is Jesus' 
test of manhood. This in its completeness of reali- 
zation was his phenomenal attainment. 

Let us consider this further in illustration. In com- 
mon parlance, we know each other when we are able 
to distinguish through the senses that which out- 
wardly characterizes us. But intimate knowledge and 
affection claim that there is something more separat- 
ing and individual, which, present or absent, we 
recognize afar off as our friend. What would he 
say and think? How would this or that affect him? 
What expression would his sympathy give to our ex- 
perience ? It is knowing this that constitutes real ac- 
quaintanceship. The reproduction in imagination of 
the bodily likeness gives no sense of reality to the 
thought of any person. When we think of him, we 
think of his attitude, his feeling toward some one of 
the states of being which may be affecting us ; we get 
his relativity to some of the inward matters that ex- 



52 JEcce Spiritus. 

ercise our minds. When we have settled it how he 
would be placed toward circumstances such as ours, 
we feel that in some sort we have had communion 
with him. 

With this sort of recognition between friends, 
though space can disturb, it cannot wholly separate. 
We often say, "I have been with such an one all day/' 
and come back to the ordinary intercourse of life with 
something of the same subdued seriousness which ever 
attends the reuniting of distant friends. Others rally 
us on our abstraction, the indifferent manner, the far- 
away look of the eyes, the difficulty of at first under- 
standing what is said about us. They say we are 
absent-minded ; and nothing could be truer to the 
fact. The soul at its highest expression is not neces- 
arily where the body is. It is wherever that is in 
which it most lives. You can keep the body here, but 
nothing can shut the soul from its own. In such case 
in reality ice are not here. Our affection, our sym- 
pathy, rules our environment. If a thousand miles 
are as one to God, so are they to a soul, just so far as 
the exercise of its functions is godlike. 

This is Jesus' conception of man, as one who has an 
expression higher than the external, which is yet most 
distinctively himself. It is the highest of mankind in 
this sense of which Jesus stands representative. He 
is the Phenomenal Man by reason of no attainment of 
virtue which merely outshines the ordinary in the 
degree of its possession of his nature, but because of 
the dominance in him of a manhood distinct in con- 
sciousness and standard from any yet seen or in- 



Christian Power. 53 

culcated. He had not to give them anything, for he 
possessed no arbitrary power, but simply to bring out 
that which was latent in them to life. They were 
spiritual in possibility, but did not know it ; and 
herein lay the key to the sadness of the situation. 
Jesus, seeing man from another stand-point, did not 
merely ask him to accept this virtue or abandon that 
vice, but demanded an entire change of outlook, work- 
ing down at the roots of being, and purifying the 
springs of action at their source. It was more than a 
revelation, a revolution, sweeping and radical, which 
was to leave nothing unchanged in the structure of 
man's thoughts and motives. It was man he modified, 
not the teaching of the schools. 

Our measure of the highest in man must answer to 
a three-fold test : it must be that which is rarest, most 
comprehensive, and most exalted. That spirituality 
meets the first condition, the age in which Jesus lived, 
as well as every subsequent one, sufficiently attests. 
The cultured are to the unconxpromising as a million 
to one. The perception of good is far in advance 
of its realization. Consciousness speaks once of 
things real and eternal, where speculation and doubt 
are heard a thousand times. That it is comprehen- 
sive no one will question when it is seen to include all 
there is of a man, all that can go to the make-up of 
his possible wholeness, all science, culture, art, equally 
the true, the beautiful, and the good. It refuses no 
fact, and scorns no inspiration. It welcomes all into 
the mighty human possibility. It absorbs from all 
sides, but never compromises, never ceases in its in- 



54 Ecce Spiritus. 

clusiveness to remain itself, one and entire. It takes 
all there is of a man to be spiritual, — head, heart, 
limbs, and life; all thought, all emotion, ail love, 
while spirituality is itself their co-ordination or control. 
It will not be classified nor divided, is neither morality 
nor religion; but that in which they, as ministering 
functions, become one. The reason why there are so 
few spiritually great characters is because of the al- 
most irresistible human tendency to be one-sided and 
partial. Men of the latter description are the kind 
of men we commonly remark and honor; while the 
spiritually great, by reason of the roundness and bal- 
ance of their faculties, often escape the notice so 
easily gained by the narrow specialist. There are 
religionists great in organization, pietists with a pecu- 
liar genius for evangelization, moralists apt at precept. 
There are natures fiery with the enthusiasm of reform, 
or dry and compendious with the nicely graded ethics 
of the schools ; but the race of whole men began and 
ended with Jesus. He was no specialist, neither 
ascetic nor prodigal, certainly not a moralist in the 
sense that Moses or Confucius were, and, least of all, 
an ecclesiastic. His manhood was complete and en- 
tire, yet through all the spiritual was distinct and 
dominant. 

Yet, although he was inclusive and cosmopolitan in 
the matter of his human interest, his breadth did not 
diminish the loftiness of his range. If there were 
none broader than he, there was also none more 
exalted. He would stop no step this side of the 
Supreme Being. It was God, unconditional purity 



Christian Power. 55 

and truth, life consciously akin to divine life, he alone 
accepts. He put everything but this under his feet, 
and could in that act go no higher. His spirituality 
does not despise the earth, but it has a winged step 
and moves high up among the realities. It cries out 
for the truth that only he wh© is high can see. It 
dignifies and elevates all to its own level. 

There can be no further test needed for the endow- 
ment of a human Saviour than this. It is salvation 
out of humanity, and yet divine with that divinity 
which hedges round humanity, and only needs awak- 
ening at the hands of a Master to save and bless. It 
is so far forth divine that it is the very power by 
which God works, that back of all other power of which 
the world knows anything. We exalt the manifold 
agencies by which our material splendor comes, and 
rate our grandeur by the mastery we attain over elec- 
tricity, magnetism, and steam. But spiritual power 
is the primal potency back of them all. It moulds 
and masters even matter, and in the resolution of each 
element back to its source stands out as the reality 
even there. It is, in fact, the only real power there 
is. It is the only shaping, guiding force we know. 
Matter is limited in its manifestations, but, blind as its 
agencies seem to be, they are motions of God's power, 
which is purely spiritual. The sphere of the latter is, 
however, unlimited. It is causative and controlling 
in every realm of being, masterful alike in things of 
time and of eternity. There is no power anywhere 
but God's power, and we can conceive of his using no 
other than this. It created and sustains and allows 



56 JEcce Spiritus. 

that infinitely fine and delicate relationship of things 
outward with things essential, which we are all the 
time coming more clearly to see. It is the only real 
potency that man possesses, making every creation of 
his possible, dictating all the expressions of his genius, 
just as in the sphere* of God it is the agency out of 
sight behind all physical manifestations in the uni- 
verse. 

Nothing is now better understood than that the 
best in a man not only has a faculty of finding an 
outward expression, but also dominates his physical 
structure and environment. There are ample illustra- 
tions around us of startling changes wrought in feat- 
ures, form, and the entire carriage, by the awakening 
of spiritual forces within. All the outward character- 
istics, the very material make-up, answers by some 
subtle law of subjection to the new motives. We 
first hear of the change in our friends, but know all 
about it as we see them. The physical responds as 
surely, if not as quickly, as the mind to the influence 
of culture. Refinement and elevation cannot be kept 
in. The soul tends ever inward to the heart and cen- 
tre, the reality of all things, but has equally a tendency 
outward, as a transforming and subduing element m 
the sphere of matter. A coarse and irregular face 
finds a new harmony under the inspirations of cult- 
ure. The features are smoothed out, and another 
tone given to the before meaningless countenance. 
The boy returns from college with a readily-divined 
change in his form and carriage, which is more than 
the simple maturing of years. Age, sickness, climate 



Christian Power. 57 

cannot more subtly modify the man outwardly, and 
put him beyond the recognition of his friends, than 
the power of education. The difference between the 
cultured and the rude is nowhere more marked than 
in the countenances they respectively lift for our 
inspection. So that the cause of culture means much 
even to him who is merely in search of outward 
beauty. And if so of ordinary education, it is still 
more so of that which is higher and more essential, 
and that, too, in proportion to the elevation of the 
sphere. 

Take a sorrow that, properly assimilated, becomes 
the nutriment of spiritual life, and will it not beautify 
the features as well as the character? See how a 
high thought or aspiration, a holy purpose, cannot be 
kept wholly out of sight ! It is a startling fact, a sug- 
gestive field for inquiry, as yet bat little touched, how 
it is that the inward is the source and measurement of 
outward development. There is a law here finer and 
more mighty than any that Newton or Galileo discov- 
ered, a law that lies close in to the heart of things, 
and explains most of our mysteries. 

Whether or not Jesus ever uttered the words at- 
tributed to him by only one of the Gospel writers, — 
"Now all power in heaven and on earth is given into 
my hands," and whatever may have been the circum- 
stances out of which the utterance actually came, — 
it is certain that there was a point even earlier in his 
career than the one instanced, when he might truth- 
fully have made the statement. What other power 
in heaven or on earth is there beside spiritual power ? 



58 Ecce JSpiritics. 

He has mastered earth, standing as he does above it, 
by the exercise of that very force which is back of 
its every manifestation. He has triumphed over 
matter, put all lower considerations under foot, in the 
conscious possession of the very power of purity and 
truth that are in God. The mastery of earth is the 
condition of his hold on heaven. This assertion 
would not be the identification of Jesus with God, 
but the transcendent utterance of one standing on 
the pinnacle of possible development, humanly con- 
scious of the vast spiritual prerogative bound up in 
the being of man. 

All through his life, Jesus was dealing with this 
problem of power, and the issue was never doubtful 
to one who watched from beginning: to end his con- 
sistent course. But there came a time when, with 
the last step taken, and the final enemy consciously 
under foot, he could feel that nothing stood between 
him and the final statement of his triumph. 

We do not in the least know the fulness of this 
power which we see so imperfectly in the working of 
God, and which resides as a possibility in universal 
humanity. It is yet to be studied reverently, though 
with scientific accuracy. It will make clear to us 
those things in the life of Jesus which, between un- 
thinking, superstitious faith on the one hand and 
blind materialism on the other, have had no chance 
of being understood ; and it will take the sting and 
doubt from much of our daily experience. That this 
possession did in the hands of Jesus become a won- 
derful vehicle of power over men, and even over 



Christian Power. 59 

outward nature, giving a sensitive sympathy with and 
sway over much that remains beyond our ordinary 
understanding and control, there is no reason to 
doubt; yet it never could have been for a moment 
outside of or antagonistic to the system of law. It 
is part of, not opposed to, the laws of nature; a 
higher possible expression of them, never for an in- 
stant overlooked in their inception. The larger view 
of nature — to be elaborated later on — finds nothing 
strange nor out of keeping with strictest certainty of 
action in this assertion. That Jesus actually per- 
formed miracles in the common acceptation of the 
term is not for a moment to be inferred. It was as 
far from him in spirit as it would have been in possi- 
bility to have entertained such an idea. It would in 
every way have thwarted the intent of his life and 
negatived all his thought. He was guilty of no such 
inconsistency in his attempt to complete nature, to 
fulfil law, and carry these out in conscious service on 
the part of man to legitimate results. He was here 
to enlarge, not to belittle, the world ; to establish the 
larger law, not to deteriorate the less. If he could 
have contravened one of the simplest of nature's 
fundamental principles, his own system — nay, God 
himself — would have been lost. 

He did, then, no miracles in this superficial sense, 
while he was not guiltless of wonderful things in 
proportion to the strength of his spiritual endow- 
ment. If God is a spiritual being, and the Creator 
of the universe, it follows that, as man becomes one 
with God by the exercise of the spiritual possibility 



60 Ecce Spiritus. 

in him, he approaches to the supremacy which God 
has in the sphere of created things; always, however, 
as with God himself, in strict accordance with, nay, as 
a very part of, law itself, and not to circumvent, but 
to complete nature. 

This is first seen in the body, where a wonderful 
subordination appears. But the body is a type of 
all matter, in sympathy with, and an epitome of, 
nature as a whole. Its laws are substantially the laws 
of the universe. No one who has not first gained 
supremacy here knows how subtle an insight, how 
powerful a sway, comes over matter at large. It was 
this that Jesus learned through the possession of this 
same power of subordinating matter. It did not pre- 
cede, but followed. It is what is back of any mastery 
over matter that we are interested in. That he was 
what he was is much. That he did one thing or 
another amounts to but little. 

It is the more gratifying to be able to look at the 
question of his miracles with this indifference, because 
of a strong conviction that the value and validity of 
Christianity in no sense depend upon the substanti- 
ation of his wonder-working power. Every other 
great religion has grounded itself on the assumption 
of miraculous and interventional efficacy, — a claim so 
old and commonplace that Jesus could not but suffer 
from its too great prominence in his own case. If it 
should be that he ranges himself with the rest in this 
respect, it would only be left us to choose between 
the different sets of wonders of the several miracu- 
lous saviours of mankind. Whether his were better 



Christian Power. 61 

or worse than the others, or not, they would certainly 
be neither original nor commanding. Simply as mir- 
acles, they prove nothing, for the other religions are 
founded upon them as well. Nor is there anything 
especially fresh and inspiring in the miracles he is 
supposed to have wrought. We should rather refuse 
to rest so splendid a mission, such an exalted power, 
on a claim so superficial and inadequate. 

Without doubt there was a foundation in fact for 
the narrative of the Gospel writers in this respect. 
Two elements enter into the account : what Jesus 
actually did, and what sort of an interpretation the 
writers themselves would have naturally put upon it, 
— an interpretation of diminishing value by reason 
of every hand through which it passed in trans- 
mission, and every year of deepening wonder which 
intervened between the actual occurrence and its 
reduction to writing. Unquestionably, Jesus aston- 
ished them with the exercise of a power, strange to 
them, but as simple and natural, and as much in har- 
mony with known law, as any in the universe. It is 
to this that our science and culture, as well as our 
larger religion, are bringing us, asserting no special 
prerogative of one man in the centuries gone by, but 
the universal goal of all human progress and enlighten- 
ment in the finer perception of the larger relationships 
of the laws by which we are surrounded. We are 
working away from miracles, and yet toward the heart 
of a wonder that surpasses even the magician's dream. 

It is useless to say that if, then, the narrative be not 
accurately true in every matter of detail, it utterly 



62 Ecce Spiritus. 

fails of authority as a whole. The fact remains, patent 
to the most literal believer in the inspiration of the 
Gospels, that Jesus' nearest disciples did not under- 
stand him. He never uttered a sjiuritual truth that 
they did not stumble at ignominiously, distorting it 
into bald literalism or utterly failing to grasp its 
divine significance. Their materialism daunted and 
dismayed him. Side by side with an expressed re- 
buke was a sadness of questioning, as if, so it seemed 
to him, they would never see and never understand. 

If they themselves confess so much in their life of 
him, have they not confessed precisely what is here 
claimed? They could catch facts which they were 
not able to comprehend. They could relate that 
about which their inferences were all false. There 
was no philosophy of history then. The crudeness 
and simplicity of the records constitute half their 
value. If we take them at their exact worth, they 
are infinitely valuable. But, from their own state- 
ments, no person in actual contact with Jesus, and no 
gospel writer, in the least comprehended the power 
which in his hands inspired them with awe. But 
they, in their acknowledged ignorance, have given us 
sufficient groundwork for the statement of a fact 
which we must have believed of him, even on slighter 
grounds of knowledge than we now possess, — that, 
being such as he was, Jesus could not have helped 
possessing a certain conscious power, incident to his 
spiritual endowment, in the sphere of nature. 



CHAPTER V. 



SPIRITUALITY. 



If it were possible to remove at once the idea of 
vagueness which surrounds the common conception 
of this word, "spirituality," it would be seen how 
much of the difficulty connected with the subject 
would disappear. Unconsciously, our modern thought 
separates it immediately from everything definite and 
certain, considering it as lawless and capricious, in 
some sort a part of the mystic's reverie and the poet's 
dream. So long as this is so, the difficulty is increased 
of making progress, between superstition on the one 
hand and materialism on the other, out into inclusive 
light and life. It must be taken from the realm of 
vagaries, and shown to be something capable of defi- 
nite and scientific statement, not as a dogma, but as a 
law, a principle, before it can accomplish the full work 
for which our time is hungering. In other words, it 
must, in some degree, as far as is possible in the nature 
of things, and yet always far enough for the compre- 
hension of those spiritually inclined, be stated in the 
terms of the understanding. It is no mere theory : 
it is life, conscious fact, practical reality. It can 
moreover be shown to be a part of the demonstration 
of things, bound up with the procedure and destiny 



64 JEcce Spiritus. 

of everything that has life. The universe is just as 
incomplete without it, as is the nature of man. Man 
completes the order of creation, and creation tends to 
find its fulfilment along the line of that peculiar power 
which is not only exercised by, but is God himself in 
action. 

There is a sense in which we are not able to state 
spirituality in terms of mathematical exactness, but 
this in no degree proves anything derogatory to its 
reality, but rather, on the contrary, places it among 
the superior facts of consciousness, whose demonstra- 
tion lies deeper down than arithmetic. There is not 
necessarily any life, anything real in that sense, in 
the theorem in geometry that we prove beyond all 
shadow of a doubt. Of the deepest, truest in us, we 
have no other demonstration than our own conscious- 
ness, sufficient unto us, but unavailable to others. It 
is only the superficial facts that we can prove : the 
realities are always lived. Experience is the greatest 
of all proofs, and yet it is about the only thing that 
cannot be demonstrated to others. It was never or- 
dained that there should be any truck and barter in 
life. He who knows most about it would be the last 
to dream of proving it. It lies too far in to the 
centre to be a subject for the sciences as we now 
know them. 

Nevertheless, while rejoicing in this reassuring fact, 
the time has come when some attempt at stating and 
understanding with all possible definiteness what we 
mean when we speak of spirituality should be made. 
It has been one of the stock words of literature and 



Spirituality. 65 

religion for centuries, serving in turn the preacher 
and the poet in his direst need, the key-note of the 
philosophy of a Goethe or Schiller or Wordsworth 
or Carlyle, as it has been in dim understanding the 
mainspring of the martyr's faith. And yet the world 
knows just as much about it to-day as it ever did, and 
no more. There is hardly another subject which it 
has not traced back with scientific accuracy to its 
source; but "spirituality" remains a word, with a 
vast, mysterious, indefinable background of phenom- 
enal attainment in the region of the good, but no 
theoretical understanding and practical statement. It 
may mean much or nothing, but no one knows exactly 
ichat it means. Life has done far more to realize it 
than language, and this is in general wise and suffi- 
cient. It has to do with that which we can make 
plain to God, for the simple reason that he knows it 
already. There are many things we should not 
dream of telling to one who did not already know 
them. 

So, at the outset, there is to be something presup- 
posed on the part of him to whom the statement of a 
spiritual fact is directed. There is nothing strange 
nor harmful in this acknowledgment. The limitation 
does not inhere in the nature of the thing itself, but 
only in the circumstances surrounding it. An illustra- 
tion will make this plain. Music most deeply affects a 
large class of people, and stands in their minds as 
something real, a fact of consciousness and life. 
There is that in them as undeniable as it is undemon- 
strable which springs into being under the influence of 



66 Ecce Spiritus. 

music. It opens another world, a strange new set of 
relationships, a vivid consciousness of delight, which 
they can yet in no wise make plain to another not so 
constituted as to perceive all this in and of himself. 
To assert over and over again out of the fulness of 
experience that which has no proof outside of experi- 
ence will not satisfy one bent alone upon the scientific 
formula. According to such a standard, all such state- 
ments are valueless, since they cannot realize the facts 
of musical consciousness to the mind of him who is 
unable to hear anything but mere sound in the music. 
The only possibility of such a realization lies in the 
possession of a sense or capacity adapted for its recep- 
tion. Externally there is a mathematical law upon 
which music is based; but this in no wise accounts for 
it. The mathematical laws upon which the proced- 
ure of music is founded may be understood without 
any appreciation of the reality of music. The most 
conscious believer in that reality cannot tell what 
and why it is. He only knows of a fact for which 
he can find no intellectual formula. But the point 
which principally interests us is that to the large 
class who turn away, bored or unaffected by the fact 
of music, the reality of the fact cannot possibly be 
demonstrated. Yet v all this does not the least disturb 
the confidence of those who have personal knowledge 
of its power. 

A step further shows that there are in music widely 
different schools of criticism. A Wagner appears, 
with a wonderful grasp of technical effects in orches- 
tration, by which a clever presentation of purely in- 



Spirituality. 67 

tellectual ideas is made. Even unmusical minds catch 
the drift of the intonation, see the lightning, hear 
the thunder, and perceive in a pictorial way, through 
the medium of sound, the conceptions which the 
composer desires to impress. But the critic boldly 
denies the artistic truthfulness of all this, and asserts 
that, beyond the technical skill in orchestration and 
the cleverness of the imitation, which no one would 
deny, this is far from being music, in any adequate 
use of that term. A majority of musically cultivated 
people will support this position, reasserting as pos- 
itively as he the conviction that the method of 
Wagner is false to art. They will declare, with no 
question as to the poetic value of the Niebelungen 
Lied, that the music will not serve the theme, but the 
theme the music, that music in its sphere will wait for 
no intellectual conception to call it into being, but 
must exist for its own sake alone. But how will they 
prove, or even make plain to others, this of which 
they are themselves absolutely conscious and certain? 
The moment the attempted demonstration is made, 
they are forced to enunciate the truth, equally true 
and incapable of logical proof, that there is at the last 
analysis only one criterion in matters musical; and 
that is a purely musical sense. The intellect cannot 
arbitrate here. It deals alone with intellectual con- 
ceptions, and is authority only in the sphere of intel- 
lectual truth. It can answer for the correctness of the 
effect to be caught by imitation ; but to know musi- 
cally of the truth of any artistic representation re- 
quires, at the outset, a peculiar, inborn capacity for 



68 JEJcce Spiritus. 

music, which art culture of the highest kind has edu- 
cated into a special sense, judging out of its own suffi- 
ciency, and absolutely final, as well as beyond the scope 
of ordinary reasons in the opinions it delivers. The 
musical sense, educated and developed into conscious 
sufficiency, decides all the nice points of criticism. 
It may not make itself clear to the terms of the ordi- 
nary understanding, but in the sphere of music it 
is the only guide and authority. There are musical 
ideas, — just as there are intellectual ideas, — incapable 
of being stated in the language of the intellect, but de- 
manding for their interpretation and expression a 
special sense corresponding strictly thereto. A musi- 
cal idea can be said to be true only on the authority of 
that to which it can hope adequately to appeal. 

It is only in the most primitive state of self-con- 
sciousness that a man will be content with the com- 
mon assignment of five senses. When science has 
reached from the rocks to man, and from man super- 
ficially to the real test of his humanity, it will be 
seen that these five are but the bed-plate and begin- 
ning of senses innumerable, and of vastly greater 
rano;e and significance. 

There is a spiritual sense, not yet pronounced in 
all, and often dormant, like the apjDreciation of reality 
in music, but authoritative in matters spiritual when 
once possessed and developed. It then becomes 
acute and wonderfully real, more consciously a part 
of the self than any of the superficial senses in their 
dealings with matter. To such as possess this in 
conscious activity, we can appeal in our spiritual crit- 



Spirituality. 69 

icism ; but there is no hope of a response from those 
who are not only without, but repellent of it. As 
well describe scenery to a person born without phys- 
ical eyes, or play Beethoven or Mozart to another 
destitute of musical sense, as to hope for understand- 
ing of spiritual realities at the hands of one spirit- 
ually blind. Jesus found this difficulty in his day, as 
he finds it now; although happily there has been 
a preparation going on through the centuries for a 
renewal of his message, with the prospect of better 
results. To-day there are hungering souls and awak- 
ening natures, thrown off alike by the unscientific 
character of current religion and the irreligiousness of 
science, who will rejoice in an attempted recognition 
of that most profoundly real and inspiring in them, 
which yet at the same time eludes the ordinary power 
of statement. 

On every hand there is a prophecy of the coming 
of this. There is expectation in philosophy, as well 
as growing faith in religion, that the work of the past 
few centuries has been a preparation and forerunner 
for this. Science has but begun its mighty task, but 
the nations will not long be satisfied with the surface 
of truth. We have infinite faith in the future of 
man. We fear neither materialism nor any threat- 
ening form of atheism. The hint of happier reaction 
is heard on every hand. Already there is deep ex- 
pectancy of a reign of spirituality about to come. 
It will come, and will save Christianity, whereof the 
age has despaired. It will dissipate the sadness of 
life, and put the lost heart into the new effort. This 



70 JEJcce Spiritus. 

salvation, like every other lasting one, will be from 
within outward. In Christianity, torn and distorted, 
there is enough to save it and the world. But Christ 
must come anew. Happily, he can. Happily, he did 
not die on Calvary, and occupies no tomb. Happily, 
his promised comforter of the ever-living Spirit can 
come, and lead us into all truth. 

There are in the life of man three spheres, so 
graded in ascent from lower to higher that each in- 
eludes the other or others below it. Thus, the mate- 
rial sphere is in and of itself, taking no cognizance 
whatever of the intellect or spirit. The intellectual 
sphere, however, is the very one which in the exercise 
of its own power has reduced outward nature and 
man physically to scientific enumeration. While the 
spiritual, stepping on to a still higher plane, subordi- 
nates intellect and body to a more radical comprehen- 
sion. Physically, man lias found his relations with 
nature ; mentally, he perceives men and matter more 
comprehensively. Man then becomes social, and the 
world responds to his thought ; while his spiritual facul- 
ties have co-ordinated nature and human fellowship 
into the higher union with God. It is this co-ordina- 
tion alone which has in any adequate degree approxi- 
mated God. Abraham caught it in fleeting glimpse, 
when he stood upon the height, and questioned sun and 
moon and stars as to the sovereignty of the universe, 
coming at last to the consciousness of the unseen God, 
who made them all, and was alone to be worshipped 
and adored. It was a part of the inspiration of 
David, as far as it was possible to one who lived amid 



Spirituality. 71 

the peculiar moral environment of his age. The 
power in large measure of natural capacity was given 
to him ; and he only lacked the presence of a loftier 
ideal to have made him king of the higher life of his 
time, as he was of Hebrew song. 

But Jesus first grasped it — or, rather, it grasped 
him — in the iron grip of a deathless necessity. He 
rejected nothing, not even the dead formalism of 
Pharisaic law ; but what profound meanings he threw 
into the universe and the life of man ! He announced 
this one great necessity of life, — that the soul, cre- 
ated in the possibility, but cut off in the practice, of 
spiritual communion, has come under the power of 
a death more fearful and fatal than mortal disease. 
He went further than a mere announcement: he 
embodied the message. He was no herald, but the 
practical fruition of what man needed. He showed 
the point and limit of earth's possible meaning, 
having first to do with the capabilities of life here 
and now; and then, by pointing men on, though not 
too exclusively, to a w^orld beyond, he transfused and 
exalted this to a significance of which they had never 
dreamed. 

In any adequate summing up, the meaning of his 
life was this, that he was absorbed in God. And yet 
not without a reservation. The word is apt, but mis- 
leading. In ordinary use, we have no other idea 
of absorption except as a process which draws from, 
without adding to. It is a complete surrender, a 
sinking of self, a losing of individuality, if not of 
identity. But here nothing of this sort is meant. 



72 JEcce Spiritus. 

Absorption in God is peculiar in this, that by the 
very nature of things the spirit finds accretion in- 
stead of depletion in sinking itself in its source. 
God is not the receiver, but the giver : he can gain 
nothing, and must impart by virtue of his very being. 
Everywhere, the lower tends to become the higher. 
It is in God, in infinity, ever reaching down to finite- 
ness, that the progress comes. Absorption in God 
means being the recipient of continual gain in com- 
munion, means the exercise of power and love in us 
toward constant amplifi cation. 

This is, however, only another way of saying " spirit- 
uality." It emphasizes the fact that there is conscious- 
ness of life, peculiar and separate from all purely 
animal instincts, in an active alliance with the higher 
life of God. On any plane above the common, a per- 
son's life is the measurement of w r hat he can know 
and love. But as bodily life is not comprehended 
merely in the functions of the hand or foot, or even of 
that fine nerve power at their source which electrifies 
them into motive and action, — so the soul's life is a fine 
fusion of spiritual attributes, which moves even back 
of these expressions of intelligence and feeling. It is 
the state of being conscious of inner and essential 
experience, closely allied to and consciously commun- 
ing with God. There is nothing more natural than 
this, nothing more surely subject to laws and exacti- 
tudes which limit it in the sphere of cause and effect. 
Nothing could be more normal and' healthy than the 
growth of a person along this line. It is only when 
the subject has been looked at unscientifically, when 



Spirituality. 73 

men have been thrown off from the hard, dry exte- 
rior of selfishness, superstition, and formalism to the 
blind zeal of fanaticism, that any hint of reproach 
has fallen upon it. In this latent spiritual preroga- 
tive, men have ever found a refuge from what was 
false or cruel. They have even accepted the reproach 
of science, and delighted to be as lawless and ungov- 
ernable in this expression of their nature as the power 
which oppressed them was mighty in its mechanical 
certainty. Oppression has always been the parent 
of unreason and license in the sphere of spiritual 
things. The reaction from the icy logic of formalism 
is a fiery enthusiasm, as faulty in expression as it is 
true in spirit. 

Hence, much of the distrust under which the facts 
of the spirit rest in the eyes of the scientists. Hence, 
even, much of the sadness and want of relation 
between outward fact and inward ideal in the minds 
of those who have given themselves up utterly to 
spiritual standards and pursuits. They have failed in 
the first instance in allowing that they were cut off 
from nature, or in any sense out of harmony with or 
antagonistic to the most law-abiding expression of life 
the universe can reveal. There has been something 
forced and unnatural in their refinement, setting them 
off one side from the sphere of order and harmony 
and health, of which nature is our nearest embodi- 
ment. It has often seemed as if to be abnormal, iso- 
lated, and unsympathetic were thought to constitute 
the necessary condition of spirituality. Only base- 
ness could be associated with anything connected with 



74 Ecce Spiritus. 

the body. The spirit was divine, and hence matter 
was to be cursed, physical laws neglected, and even 
health ignored, so long as aspiration remained. 

It must be understood that one law runs through 
the various spheres of man's nature, the highest ex- 
pression of which is spirituality. This latter is only 
the co-ordination and completion of even physical 
law. The creation was one, and the law must be 
one also. There can be no true sj^irituality with- 
out health, or at least the appreciation of and struggle 
for health. It means full and harmonious develop- 
ment from the basis in the body to the loftiest reach 
of aspiration in the soul. It means respect for the 
universe and every law thereof, and reverence for, not 
rejection of, that physical being which is so closely 
allied with and typical of the spirit. It is a unity of 
laws otherwise at war with and subversive of each 
other. It enlarges instead of narrows the sphere of 
possible enjoyments, takes the despair out of poetry 
and the lamentation out of religion. Its highest ex- 
pression is a free, healthy sympathy with life and law 
everywhere. Reverencing all spheres of creation, it is 
uncompromising in its devotion to the highest. It has 
a tendency away from all incompleteness, but it is no 
craven's flight. It is rather like the sustained passage 
of the bird, which keeps the nice proportion in its 
outlook between a world never lost to view beneath 
and the boundlessness of immateriality above. 

Perhaps no well-known character better illustrates 
this incompleteness of conception than the poet Schil- 
ler. Side by side in his experience, we see an extreme 



Spirituality. 75 

spirituality, an uncompromising pursuit of high ends, 
and an attendant want of relationship to the lower 
and basal facts of his nature, which resulted in distor- 
tion and unhappiness. While we are ourselves so far 
from a true understanding of spiritual laws as to feel 
that nothing could in his case have been more natural 
and inevitable than such a result, we profoundly ad- 
mire the man's exaltation of mind, and that singleness 
of aim which counted suffering as nothing to the ac- 
complishment of enduring ends ; but we also confess 
that all this was attained at the expense of breadth 
and naturalness, that a resultant want of harmony and 
a sharpening of the sense of failure, in short, a certain 
narrowness of spiritual conception, must of necessity 
have followed. 

The criticism begins in the fact that Schiller, and 
such as he, have loved the higher to the exclusion, 
nay, to the abhorrence, of the lower. Instead of har- 
mony on a more comprehensive plane of understand- 
ing between the spheres of man's nature, a warfare 
has been introduced. Instead of giving a basis to 
aspiration in the reverent study of natural laws, spirit 
has been pitted against matter. What wonder that, 
too often wounded to despair in the unequal conflict, 
the former has been borne in conscious bitterness 
from the field of life! Thought and life, which 
should have been rounded out to fulness by contact 
and sympathy with the facts as they are, have per- 
sistently narrowed themselves to a purely ideal con- 
ception of a world and a humanity as they ought to 
be, in the fancy of poet or pietist. Health would 



76 Ecce Spiritus. 

have come with the fundamental truth that this is 
God's universe, and not ours, and that our work is not 
to correct, but to cany out and complete it; that we 
are to study the facts, find the laws, and work out the 
harmony, rather than in scorn of the body God has 
given us, and in a disgust at men as they are, which 
is an insult to the Being who made them and us, to 
submit our souls to the torments of a spiritual alle- 
giance, divorced from the basal conditions in matter. 
There are manifold wants and miseries in men, 
which, while being strictly human, are not graceful 
in expression ; but they will be found full of an 
infinite grace to him who bends to their necessities. 
This is the first condition of even poetic truthfulness. 
There can be no artistic happiness where these con- 
ditions are ignored. Schiller himself confesses that 
the failure to see this had been one of the great mis- 
takes of his life. Carlyle has described the prevailing 
tone of spiritual coldness and isolation in Schiller's 
life in his description of the sort of hero Schiller 
most loved to paint. This type he finds in Posa, 
whom he pictures as " towering aloft, far-shining, clear 
and cold as a sea beacon." "In after years," says 
Carlyle in comment, " Schiller himself saw well that 
the greatest lay not here. YTith unwearied effort, 
he strove to lower and widen his sphere." The fine 
spiritual culture of a Channing came to the same 
result. After intense suffering and a life-long isola- 
tion, depriving him of a world of sympathies which 
even he could not afford to lose, Dr. Channing came 
to see the partialness of his attitude. His advice to 



Spirituality. 77 

a young man was to get close to humanity, — an ad- 
vice which was emphasized by the confession that, 
if he were to live his life over again, he would mingle 
more unreservedly among men of all classes. 

Spirituality has tended too often to become fastid- 
iousness. Robustness and vitality have not charac- 
terized its expressions so much as aesthetic fineness. 
Delicacy of insight is not necessarily depth of vision, 
as removal from men is not always the condition of a 
higher humanity. The repose of the heights may be 
only negative. Certain it is that there is a repose, 
as there is an individual perfection, so unrelated to 
the warm and living realities as to be akin to death. 
There is a region, cold and sunless, that seems to be 
high simply because it is far from earth, but not nec- 
essarily on that account any nearer heaven. 

See how practically this extreme position becomes 
a fatal limitation in the sphere where it seeks freedom 
and harmony. In his JEsthetic Letters, Schiller dis- 
cusses the question of the advantage gained by man 
in his struggle out of mere animalism and his sub- 
jection to new and higher spiritual motives. Even 
while uncompromisingly true himself, and conscious 
all the time that he is himself the representative of 
the result he pictures, he yet declares that it is but 
the loss of " the happy limitation of the animal, and 
the unenviable superiority of missing the present in 
an effort directed at a distance." 

But let us notice the experience out of which such 
a discouraging** statement has come. Schiller asserts 
that sadness, and not health and harmony, is the por- 



78 Ecce Spiritus. 

tion of the uncompromising. The trouble here was 
not in spirituality so much as in Schiller's particular 
illustration of it. With no disposition to forget the 
painful circumstances which hurried Schiller on to a 
forced productiveness in violation of the simplest laws 
of health, the fact must nevertheless be stated that a 
criminal neglect of the basal conditions of well-being 
and happiness lay behind that arraignment of spiritu- 
ality. He forgot to base his superiority in the funda- 
mental facts of nature, — the first laws legislated by 
almighty wisdom into the make-up of man, which even 
animal creation, in the sufficiency of instinct, the more 
rigidly obeys. He failed to see that the harmony of 
the highest will include that of the lower as well; and 
the pursuit of the ideal is only incongruous with the 
present, when it ignores and falsifies the bit of heaven 
that God has intrusted to every day. 

The fact of this inward depression in the face of 
the necessary conditions of existence was not due to 
the presence of spirituality in the case of Schiller, but 
to the absence of that respect and obedience to merely 
physical laws upon which lower and higher happiness 
are alike dependent. The mood of distrust comes 
with the unnaturalness, not with the idealism. " He 
forced his sickly body," says a recent writer, in speak- 
ing of Schiller, " so that the spirit should have com- 
plete control over his intellectual working power. 
With him was no hesitation, no jDatient waiting till the 
hand of Fate beckoned him on : he tore off recklessly 
the fetters which bound him to real lifer We all 
have in mind that pitiable picture of the strong spirit- 



Spirituality. 79 

ual giant dragging that wronged and suffering body 
through the strain of night work in a defiance of nature 
which was based on a false and fatal stimulation. 
Surely, from such a source, though countless forms of 
poetic beauty may not fail to come, our last word upon 
spiritual possibility shall not be drawn. If Schiller 
had accorded to his nervous system one-quarter of the 
respect he paid to his spiritual nature, much of that 
sadness and want of relation between outward reality 
and inward ideal had disappeared. The testimony of 
poetry and religion has been jarred out of tune by this 
presence of a vast body of basal laws forgotten in the 
pursuit of abstract perfection and purely ideal ends. 
When spirituality shall have been reconciled with 
that law which our science is teaching us to revere ; 
when it shall have broadened and deepened as well 
as uplifted man's outlook, — it will then be a power 
making for the conscious increase of human happi- 
ness. The despair of idealism and the sadness of 
thought in our day, and in all days, has not been be- 
cause men looked too high, nor because the price of 
wisdom is necessarily sorrow, but because they have 
not looked broadly enough, and have not based the 
airy superstructure of their faith on sufficiently firm 
foundations. When the idealist is the one who has 
most profound respect for law everywhere, even in 
the body, he will become what he was intended to be, 
not only the most complete, but the happiest of men. 
The whole tone of past experience, all the writings 
and traditions on this subject, must be forgotten, and 
a new start taken. Spirituality has not yet had its 



80 Ecce Spiritus. 

full and final expression. It is profiting by the condi- 
tions that science has created in modern thought. 
Though long held in abeyance, when it comes again, 
it will come full-orbed and powerful, with the facts 
instead of unreason in its appeal to mankind. Then, 
it will have no bitterness as the expression of disap- 
pointed ideals, knowing that the highest can never be 
lost, since it is a part of the evolution of apparently 
most insignificant material laws. It will be the sim 
of health and of a joy in nature which comes from the 
infinite enlargement of its sphere. No one will be 
thrown off from it by reason of the minor key of its 
utterance, but will welcome it as a way out of con- 
scious weariness and discord. No sigh of resignation 
will be taken as its true representative expression : it 
will turn earth's sadness into a song. 

Spirituality, then, is an attitude, an aim, an atmos- 
phere, a dominance of sphere. It allows degrees, 
steps in progress and attainment. It is a growth, but 
a final perfection. It has to do chiefly with the mo- 
tives and aspirations, the heart and centre of conduct. 
As it was in Jesus, it appears plain and full and many- 
sided; a calm assurance in himself, with certainty 
beyond. As seen in us, it is manifold in its phases, 
evolutionary and uncertain in attainment. But it is 
that which lies at the root of being, that which, above 
all the petty standards of men, a spiritual God must 
last of all consider in us. It is practical Judgment 
Day already come, deciding beyond recall the position 
we hold in the heavenly scale. It is the religion that 
unfolds and unitizes all things, harmonizing all con- 



Spirituality. 81 

flicting forms in one supreme and common statement. 
There are many religious systems, but only one spir- 
ituality, which is the basal truth back of them all. 
Truly religious natures always find that they agree, 
no matter how widely they differ in theologic state- 
ment; and this comes the minute they touch the 
spiritual verities which underlie every honest expres- 
sion of faith. It is a great bond of brotherhood in 
the much-divided temple of the world's worship, 
doing away with nationalities and ecclesiastical dis- 
tinctions. 

In this, the schemes of redemption and retribution 
find their reconciliation. God neither rewards nor 
punishes, having much too mighty business on hand. 
He is no taskmaster nor apportioner of gifts. His 
law is large enough and perfect enough to take us 
back to him. The rest lies with us. But the law is 
no abstraction, no dull round of mechanical cause and 
effect. It is full of the tenderness and possible com- 
munion, which in truth may be said to be the law 
itself. It is fundamentally the condition of close and 
intimate relationship with God. It leaves out nothing 
of warm and helpful and personal contact. Least of 
all an abstraction, it is to him who is exercised thereby 
the most real and vital part of consciousness. 

We call the vehicle of our higher converse prayer, 
and it is well that we do ; but the vast significance of 
the word has not yet been understood. Men are still 
in the body of it, caught in the meshes of fine-spun 
sentences, with the heart of the reality too often left 
out. How simple the test of God, and how delicate 



82 Ecce Spiritus. 

the power of infinite understanding, Jesus, that much- 
worshipping, but yet silent nature, illustrated! His 
life was a prayer, but how scanty and brief the ]3eti- 
tions ! How conscious the nearness and reliance, how 
certain the peace ! They, too, had their prayer- 
gauge and the measurement of husks. Jesus con- 
founded them not with an argument, but with the 
statement of a larger fact. There was nothing that 
they should not receive, if they prayed for it ; but no 
one knew better than he that prayer is communion, 
and has no favors to ask, — that it seeks oneness with, 
not concessions from, almighty wisdom and love. It 
is heart to heart, and he knows nothing can be denied 
to that attitude. It is close to the law of things, 
yearning to be one with it. It is the utterance of 
man's respect for God and his universe, and hope of 
final harmony with both. It would lay no finger on a 
single law of God, reverent to the last of divine pur- 
poses, and simply asking to get back where the finali- 
ties are, and away from the imperfections in itself. 
It is not an act, but a life ; a nearness, not an utter- 
ance, although it sometimes must speak. But, even 
then, the language is the least of.it. It knows that it 
is answered, has gotten all that it has asked for or 
can ask for in this way, when it has brought the soul 
back to God. When one has the Whole, he can 
surely want no more. 

When Jesus speaks of prayer, he has reference to 
those things in the sphere of prayer. He is ever 
inside the circumference, at the heart and centre, in 
his talk of spiritual realities. It is his supreme task 



Spirituality. 83 

to get men's thought off from that which is outside, 
and rest it on the truest in themselves. The king- 
dom of heaven is within you, he tells them ; and so 
are all possible hells. The old questions of our child- 
hood find no longer a place upon our lips. He knows 
of heaven who has been in heavenly states, and no 
other one ever will know. Spirituality does away 
with all the theologic interrogatories. An answer 
must come to us out of the consciousness of experi- 
ence, or we remain baffled questioners on the spiritual 
outskirts. But more of this later on. This, how- 
ever, is here and always certain : that the realities 
of life, — that which lies nearest our consciousness, — 
find expression and fulness alone in the attitude of 
spirit to spirit, in the outpouring and incoming of 
such power and such love as are possible between 
us and God. 



CHAPTER VI. 



NATURE AOT> SPIRIT. 



It would at first thought appear that this idea of 
Christian power were inconsistent with the prevailing 
notions of scientific accuracy, that there were, indeed, 
no possible harmony between such a conception of 
spiritual religion and the facts of nature as we have 
come to know them. The reasoning of our age, an 
age of purely transitional work, which in finding 
the new has superficially abandoned the old without 
striving to discover the real truth and relationship 
between the two, has declared that the spiritual in- 
stincts and the understanding of man are antipodal 
extremes of the human make-up, capable of no recon- 
ciliation, and, wherever found, antagonistic to each 
other. 

Thus, a spiritual man may be good and poetic, 
and fit for a metaphoric heaven, but he can have no 
part in the nice system of law which science reveals 
as the fundamental condition of all things in nature. 
He is a mystic, a dreamer, an abnormal growth of the 
sentiments, cradled in the centuries of superstition. 
The scientific man may be accurate and profound, but 
his reliability is suspected the minute he begins to 
generalize outside of the well-understood sphere of 
cause and effect. 



Nature and Spirit. 85 

But the fact is, spirituality is the outcome of the 
development of the very laws of man's being. He is 
not a creature of fixity on one side of his nature alone, 
but bound by a law as many-sided as his being itself. 
Moreover, the conditions, as seen in different spheres, 
here physical, there intellectual or spiritual, are in 
reality one condition. The law of human develop- 
ment is from lower to higher; but it is one law, 
whether seen in the realm of body, mind, or soul. It 
has manifold expressions, each perfect in itself, but 
none of them unrelated to the final crowning expres- 
sion to which all are subordinated. Man's spiritual 
development is in perfect harmony with the laws of 
Nature everywhere. It sympathizes with and com- 
pletes them. Nowhere can there be distrust or an- 
tagonism between the two. The facts to be especially 
noticed here are that spirituality in man proceeds ac- 
cording to law, and that, too, a fundamental law ; and 
that the lower is not only related to, but completed 
in, the higher law. 

Man's progress is from without inward. He begins 
a child of sense, pleased with material toys, satisfied 
with physical attainment. He never ends save at the 
highest, a man of the mature reach of the before 
latent but now regnant faculties of his spiritual nat- 
ure. We hesitate to call it spiritual, for fear of mis- 
understanding. We mean nothing but the man 
himself, simple and natural, untouched by the super- 
stitious, and every way in normal poise of intellectual 
and physical health. We mean the most thoroughly 
vigorous and most finely balanced manhood, with all 



86 Ecce Spiritus. 

the vitality and zest and eagerness of life about it, a 
lover of the sunshine, and believer above all else in 
the progress of action. Then we ask simply for the 
highest and completest development of the being that 
this represents. How shall the unknown quantity, the 
potential man, appear? Where does he come into 
supreme consciousness of his powers and faculties, 
and realize himself so thoroughly and completely that 
he can never take a stej) further in sphere ? Where 
does he begin to subordinate on the one hand, and 
refuse to compromise on the other ? 

Manifestly, at the spiritual point. This is the cul- 
minating step in man's evolution, according to the 
strict laws of his being:. And this we have said is 
every way natural. It is not only the condition of 
his higher nature, but it began in and is harmonious 
with the laws of Nature as we commonly understand 
that term. The assertion is amply sustained by a full 
showing of the facts. 

There is no word of our language more misapplied 
in common use than the word "nature." It is made 
to mean something fixed and certain, something that 
can be defined and understood, in contrast to spirit, 
which is vague and lawless. Whereas, in point of fact, 
spirit is in almost universal use, as well as in fact no 
less clearly understood, and no less definable than 
nature itself. If we employ the superficial etymology 
which derives the word from the past participle of 
the verb nascor, referring it merely to that which has 
been born, to creation as an already created, fixed, and 
finished work, we may have the shadow of a support 



Nature and Spirit. 87 

for a real distinction here. If, on the other hand, we 
trace the word back more carefully, and see how the 
structural significance of it when so found harmonizes 
completely with the position here taken, we shall say 
that the word stands in either sphere of spirit or mat- 
ter for precisely the same kind, if not almost the same 
degree, of knowledge and certainty. The fact so often 
asserted by materialism of the definiteness of nature, 
as well as its entire inference from this assumption, is 
seen to be false when we find our word rather in the 
future participle, a derivative from naturus instead 
of natus, and referring not so much to what has been 
born as to that which is ever about to be born, a 
future, unknown, untableted possibility, as becomes 
the creation of a God who is not dead, but as much 
alive and as truly creative now as ever. God is the 
only example of finished work, if, indeed, such a state- 
ment may be made of Him ; the rest, all the rest, lives 
and moves, and has its being in Him. It either answers 
this condition or is finished in the sense of being dead, 
which no creation of God ever is or can be. The 
ancients, though infinitely less scientific, were far truer 
to the reality of things when they made their word 
natura, than we moderns have been in our application 
of it. In their day of modest attainment, it was, per- 
haps, easier to see that nature is, as far as we can 
understand, a process and not yet a finality, than it 
is in ours of boastful but not over-discriminating 
attainment in the field of science. 

The last and greatest assertion of science is that nat- 
ure is not yet completed, and in no wise likely, even 



88 JEJcce Spiritus. 

in the theories of the wisest investigator, to be soon 
understood or exhausted. We have a vast array of 
data, and know some of its superficial facts; but, until 
it ceases to be an infinite process, we can only hope to 
see the beginning. The most deeply learned can tell 
us nothing of the end. Indeed, the why and the 
whither are what we hear least about. He can indeed 
assert, with no longer any fear of intelligent contradic- 
tion that the world was never created, sprung out of no 
mythic Genesis period, but was only set in motion. It 
is still a naturus, still a development and an unknown 
possibility ; never natus, but about to be, in a procession 
never ended; something to-day which is only the con- 
dition for that which is to be yet farther on. So far 
as we can see, it is, like spirit, everywhere and always 
the great To Be. 

Is it winter? No. There is deception in the aspect 
of effortless sleep that suggests the name. In reality, 
it is all the time busy with the beginnings of spring. 
It is never spring, but always becoming summer. 
Even summer will not let you rest without continual 
hints that autumn is maturing in the lap of apparent 
freshness. At no point can you catch and fix Nature 
long enough to tabulate her. She has no seasons that 
are not pressing on to, nay, are very parts of others. 
The universe is restless and insatiable, and the solution 
of its secret is not yet. We talk of sunrise; but even 
the night is restless, and hints of day long before the 
sun has reached the morning line. Almost in the heart 
of the summer night there was a faint lifting on the 
eastern ridge, and there was something of morning 



Nature and Spirit. 89 

even in the midst of night. There is no moment of its 
life, no spot of its changing surface, but tells of a 
world in motion, an eternal looking forward to some- 
thing which never is, except as a farther step toward 
that illusive fulfilment which can never be understood 
from any other than the higher stand-point. 

Science has made no approach to a comprehension 
of nature in a sense that satisfies the real craving of 
the mind for knowledge. It knows more of what there 
is in nature, but nature itself is yet as difficult to un- 
derstand and describe as ever. It is a " divine mys- 
tery," equal to any that true religion presents, a vague, 
vast potency, which our history and science are alike 
powerless to solve. It is simply God in outward ac- 
tion. Its laws and purposes are expressions of his will 
in the sphere of matter. We are permitted to see the 
process, but the heart of the mystery flies from us here 
as elsewhere. 

Even the reality of spirit is not more utterly beyond 
the full comprehension and the exact tabulation of 
man. Nay, it lies far nearer in to the centre of con- 
sciousness, with facts in its sphere fully as vital and 
certain, — indeed, much more so, — and a declaration of 
knowledge vastly more intimate and satisfactory than 
any investigations of science have yet brought. The 
latter can tell only of what it sees, with the limitations 
of that most delicate of all human organs, the eye, ap- 
pearing at every step ; while the assertions of spiritual 
experience, — the testimony of human consciousness, 
are a test of knowledge which is, to the individual at 
least, absolute. 



90 Ecce Spiritus. 

Not only is there one common condition for nature 
and spirit, but it is, beyond this, true that they are in 
different realms of action one and the self-same thing, 
a power or expression of God, seen here operative ma- 
terially in the universe and the motions of man's phys- 
ical being, and there in the movements of his spiritual 
universe as we know it reflected in the life of the soul. 

Hence the strange illusiveness of our life : the sad- 
ness, the lack of co-ordination between inward ideal 
and outward reality, the dreamlike swiftness of its 
passage from night to night. If it is true that spirit- 
ually man finds no resting-place, has and is yet nothing 
final, it is equally certain that materially he is in a sys- 
tem of tireless change and progression, wherein no 
definite and fixed attainment of knowledge can stay 
and satisfy his nature. Nowhere is he a part of the 
natus, nowhere fully born into finished and sufficient 
conditions, but everywhere a motion of the naturus 
tending through lower nature up to higher nature, and 
never satisfied save in the All, the infinitude of blessed- 
ness and power. 

Hence, also, his outward sphere and surroundings 
are in exact keeping with the laws and conditions of 
bis internal structure. In both, he is natural. His 
nature is the possibility of a long line of development 
which begins in the first molecular motion of matter, 
and ends only with the very closest relationship in 
conscious activity of his spirit to God's. The laws of 
his body and his soul agree. Indeed, they constitute 
one law, with reciprocal working. He thus needs 
nothing opposed to nature to save him, — not less 



Nature and Spirit. 91 

nature, but more. He is lost simply for the want of 
that fine relationship between the two spheres wherein 
are life and health and all possible human perfection. 

Somewhere, he will find the sinfulness of this ab- 
normal denial of nature. Sometime, he will see that to 
go counter to nature is, after all, the only unpardona- 
ble sin. It is the greatest crime of man's possible utter- 
ance against the Holy Ghost of God to say one word 
against the condition which he gave to man funda- 
mentally, as the one hope of reconciliation. When a 
man violates nature, he is estranged from God; and 
the vindication of all moral law lies in the renewed 
obedience. When a person does not know God, it is 
simply because only half his nature has been recog- 
nized or cultivated. Convert him up to himself, and 
there is no need of farther effort. We can trust the 
spirit to find God, the only trouble in the matter be- 
ing with the want of the former, and not with any 
doubt as to the existence or accessibility of the latter. 

It is, then, more nature that we need to fix and 
complete our religion. It matters not whether we 
say physical or spiritual nature : it is all one, with dif- 
ference only in the degree and sphere of exercise. 
The natural man is the spiritual man. The unspirit- 
ual is the only unnatural, the only lairfess, the only 
erratic one. There is no distinction between nature 
and grace. Nature is grace. It will save the unnat- 
ural and the sinful with the very health and healing 
that resides in God's sweet, pure laws. 

The grace of Jesus Christ is the normal growth of 
every soul out of low limitations and false stand- 



92 Ecce Spiritus. 

ards of living into life and light. The sin against 
heaven, the only one for which God, in the presence 
of his laws which he has ordained to carry out not 
only his righteousness, but his mercy as well, will 
ever hold us to account, is the violation of one, even 
the simplest, of those conditions engrained in the 
structure of our being, by which the end of our exist- 
ence is attained and we come constantly nearer him. 
Jesus came solely for this, — to bring man back to 
nature, himself, his God. He offered no substitute 
for this, — not even himself, personally considered, as 
we shall see later on, — no sign and catchword, no 
ordinance and hierarchy, but only law in its whole- 
ness ; not lower nor higher, but One as from the crea- 
tive hand, and tending through manifold spheres and 
expressions to one great end. 

But the thought has many ramifications, nor can we 
yet say that we have in any sense exhausted the sug- 
gestiveness of the theme. TTe can, however, pause 
here only to notice one common error into which 
some of the best thinking of the world has fallen. In 
spite of all the enlightenment of science, the fallacy 
is still rife that man upon his natural side is perfect, 
and only comes to disease or death by reason of some 
failure in obedience to the laws of health. Nature, 
it is urged, — and the word is here used after the com- 
mon custom as synonymous with the universe of 
matter, — is perfect ; and, if man had never disobeyed, 
he would neither suffer, nor cease physically to exist. 
This is substantially the statement, with perhaj)s cer- 
tain modifications in the case of some thinkers, of a 



Nature and Spirit. 93 

wide-spread feeling that there is something unnatural 
in disease and death, some disturbance of the plan 
which intended for man only an endless enjoyment of 
physical functions and an uninterrupted inheritance 
of the earth. 

Unquestionably, it is true that there is hardly any 
preaching more in demand at the present time than 
that which holds up a greater reverence for and obe- 
dience of the laws of health, to the end that the 
misery and needlessly premature decay of man's phys- 
ical powers may be arrested. Without doubt, health, 
happiness, life itself, are more truly in the hands of 
the race than we, in the light of our superficial moral- 
ity, are willing to believe, — but always within certain 
well-defined limits. Nature is perfect in her sphere, 
but her sphere is circumscribed. It is finite, and 
necessarily has a point beyond which no care, no 
painstaking, can carry us. Man physically suffers 
under a transmitted weakness and death-rate, which 
it must be the work and pride of his future science 
and religion to decrease. He is doing it now, and will 
continue to do it more and more by every sign of the 
times ; but, physically, man never had and never can 
have anything but a limited goal to his efforts after 
physical perfection. Indeed, his chief encouragement 
in the work comes not from a hope to be physically 
immortal, but from the fact which he will grow to see 
yet more and more clearly, — that this fulness of obedi- 
ence to natural law is the condition, nay, a very part 
of his spiritual perfection and his more essential con- 
tinuance of life. His desire and effort for obedience 



94 Ecce Spiritus. 

will be the same, but bis point of view will be shifted 
from the material to the spiritual. 

But beyond all this there is in the current notion a 
gross misconception of nature as well as injustice to 
man. The traditional idea says that man was created 
perfect, but fell in Adam (which latter is in some 
sort a metaphor for an inherent but, it must be con- 
fessed, contradictory weakness of will and liability to 
sin), and was then redeemed substitutionally by Christ. 
But nothing is plainer as a matter of fact than that 
man was not created perfect. Nature, his influential 
environment, his own physical, and hence necessarily 
finite, constitution, were his limitations at the outset. 
lie fell in no Adam, but was borne along a sliding plane 
of inherent imperfection, which was to be the condi- 
tion of his development, the test and possibility of his 
virtue. And he was saved by what Christ can help 
him to be, from the past sin which spirituality sinks in 
dominant virtue, and from all future failings which 
through the same power can be averted from him. 

It must be that Nature is looking to ideal perfec- 
tion in the future, be it here or there; but, as we know 
her, she is but a finite possibility. Her life includes 
two principles, seemingly forever at war, but at last 
known to be but complemental parts of a great whole, 
— propagation and destruction, existence and death. 
While she keeps the germ of everything, she has 
no respect for individuality. In this sense, so far as 
physical faculties alone can see, she destroys. In this 
sense there is torture in her ministry to man. 

But it is Nature herself that surfers and dies. 



Nature and Spirit. 95 

There is the epitome of every human sorrow or ter- 
ror in the universe itself. The world is bright and 
sunny and hopeful; but the world is troubled as well. 
Nature has sickness and health in a strictly unthink- 
ing sphere where no question of choice or will, as 
in the case of man, ever enters. The very laws of 
her being, with which no metaphoric Adam ever tam- 
pered, work themselves out in this reciprocal action 
of forces apparently opposed and yet really one. 
She is not always the embodiment of smiling fresh- 
ness and perennial vigor. She knows in the econ- 
omy of her life lassitude and inanition, times of weak- 
ness and days of spent vitality, when the whole aspect 
of the world is one of intense struggle or unmis- 
takable agony that rends the earth with efforts after 
renewed harmony, or a weary lifelessness that steals 
the tonic from the air and the very curl from the 
grass blade and the leaf. 

Nature goes on in health and freshness for a certain 
time; and then, out in the world, as in the body of 
man, the waste of active forces, accumulating, must be 
thrown off, and she becomes sick. Her very life is an 
alternating process of waste and repair. The former 
we call " death," the latter in its preponderance we 
call "life"; but it is the presence of both in proper 
proportion that in reality constitutes life in any of its 
strictly human forms. Nevertheless, this is the very 
thing that we call " disease " in man, causing disturb- 
ance and struggling and often desolation in nature. 
It is a process of death in her members. It is the 
normal way of purification, though here and there a 



96 Ecce Spiritus. 

man dies or a tree is turned up rootless or a feeding 
ox is struck dumb in the healing process. The in- 
herent waste goes on accumulating to the limit which 
nature's finiteness ordains, and then the black €loud 
gathers upon the horizon, and the flash and thunder 
put man in awe of so stupendous a natural retribution 
in the very air. Or a sudden tempest goes forth, 
sweeping before it harmless forests and innocent men, 
both doomed alike of Nature in her integrity. Or a 
pestilence rages, that has no connection whatever with 
human remissness, as in the case of those which the 
early adventurers found in their second visits to this 
coast, when whole tribes of Indians had been obliter- 
ated or driven away, and the very face of the country 
for hundreds of miles of almost primitive wilderness 
showed the desolation. We can fi]l up the swamps 
and find in some measure the cure and preventive of 
malaria ; but it does not alter the fact that the earth 
has always been in and of itself subject to sickness 
and death, nor furnish sufficient ground for hope that 
it will not always have weak spots in its surface as 
well as contagion and destruction in its air. Nature 
herself does not die, nor, so far as we know, the race 
of man as a whole ; but the process of a continual ex- 
tinction of both animate and inanimate creation is the 
very condition of nature's life. Man never changed 
and never can change the fact. He has limits within 
which he can modify and improve these things ; but 
the real hope and blessedness of this lies not so much 
in what he can do to make earthly conditions perfect, 
as in the fact that he by his effort here is bringing his 
outward environment into harmony with his higher 



Nature and Spirit. 97 

life, becoming, by the breadth of his obedience, natu- 
ral everywhere. 

So he founds and bases his religion. He is not at 
war with matter, but only labors to subordinate it to 
that which is higher. He knows that Nature just as 
she is, after man has done his utmost to avail himself 
of her fullest possibility, is right. The body is his 
special sphere ; and, although it may suffer and die, it 
is yet capable of spiritual domination. But his spirit- 
uality would not so much crowd it down as lift it up. 
It is higher than it seems, a fundamental part of 
spiritual nature. The unity of the ultimate end of 
both, and the community of law proceeding through 
both back to God, its originator, elevates and digni- 
fies this loftiest form of matter into something worthy 
even of spiritual culture and respect. 

The assertion that Nature in her sphere and possi- 
bility has limits does not conflict with what has gone 
before. So much is certain, but we have not yet de- 
fined those limits. The boundaries of even the finite 
have not opened out to us the fulness of this human 
possibility, nor its infinitely important relationships 
with spirit. In its sphere, it is fixed and determinate; 
but we are now hardly more than in the beginning of 
our comprehension of that sphere. Nature is simply 
the blank possibility of matter, just as spirituality is 
the unknown possibility of the soul. The truth is, no 
one knows so much of what the world is and contains 
as he who approaches it with the spiritual vision. 
Lower nature is fulfilled and completed in the higher. 
He is the true scientist who puts the facts together, 
and sees that, even in outward nature, which does not 



98 JEcce Spiritus. 

reside in the mere proportions he can weigh and 
measure. Reciprocally, also, he is most genuinely 
spiritual who gets closest to the heart of nature every- 
where, who studies and sympathizes with the humblest 
expression of its law-abiding unity. He first subordi- 
nates sense that he may be truly sensible of the vast 
import of this world, as well as by that means also 
thoroughly spiritual. Thus, the outlook comes with 
the inlook; and the loftiness of his point of vision is 
the condition of his conrprehensiveness. This would 
constitute the spiritual scientist, the one for whom the 
world, already too long fed on husks, is waiting. And 
he will come at length, when his schooling shall have 
been completed, and finish the work of the stone- 
breakers. 

It was in harmony with such a view of nature, and 
in sympathy with law as seen in, but not monopo- 
lized by the outward world, that Jesus came, as the 
most natural of men, and comes again to-day. He is 
all in all spiritual, and yet through all natural. He 
knows no compromise, but infinite relation and adapta- 
tion. He is everywhere a lover of men and of nature, 
and in these supremely one with God. It is here that 
he rises to his kingship. He alone can take all crea- 
tion back, by no strain and stretch of purely natural 
symbols, to the Creator. It is here that he found his 
power; and here came to him his clear conception, 
nay, his realization of God. He learned little from 
the schools and the books; but his nature in the possi- 
bilities which he was supremely fitted to develop 
opened up the kingdom of God out of, not in opposi- 
tion to, the kingdoms of this world. 



CHAPTER VII. 



GOD OR CHRIST. 



In" whatever way we consider Christianity, it was 
of all religions the most radical. Not only did it 
strike at the roots of being, but, independent of all 
systems, it struck at the root of every existent con- 
ception of religious life. It was fearlessness itself, or, 
rather, it was that utter absorption in what it held 
to be true which allows no thought of consequences. 
Jesus was the king of sceptics, the prince of radicals. 
He absolutely disregarded the sanctity of the tradi- 
tional; while the fine flavor of ancient things, merely 
as such, had with him no sacred acceptance. He did 
indeed declare that he had come, not to destroy, but 
to fulfil ; and here it is that the tendency of the genu- 
ine radical is so commonly misunderstood. He was 
there for positive work, to build fairer and larger 
than any before him. But he must first clear the 
ground and prepare the soil for the reception of an 
entirely new growth. In all this, however, he was 
eclectic and comprehensive. He saw, what the mod- 
ern radical is coming so grandly to apprehend, the 
universality of truth, the necessity for finding in 
every outgrown fallacy or worn-out statement the 
germ of an unseen verity. He knew that truth be- 



100 JScce Spiritus. 

longs to no man, is the exclusive property of no 
system. Every earnest mind and every honest for- 
mulation needs but a larger view infused into its 
localized or narrow statement; and he rejected no part 
of truth already uttered or put into practice. For 
the old, he seems to have had no undue respect ; but 
he knew that truth is old. He paid no reverence to 
tradition, but had no quarrel with the kernel of divine 
verity enclosed in the imperfect human shell. 

The law, in a certain sense, he accepted, simply 
because his was in no wise the work of a law-maker. 
So far as laws were needed, and could in their sphere 
be successful, he was satisfied with those already ac- 
cepted. With all their limitations and dangers, they 
played a certain rudimentary part in the elevation 
of the race. No more were needed ; and none could, 
on the whole, better answer the purpose they were 
there to subserve. They had already, moreover, a 
well-recognized sanctity, and, so far as they could 
substantiate what he had to enforce, furnished an au- 
thority universally acknowledged, to which he could 
appeal. Whenever the truth he uttered had already 
been made current with the stamp of Moses or the 
prophets, he did not hesitate to convict or coerce 
them out of their own sacred writings. He had no 
spiritual pride, no priestly arrogance. He was willing 
to share the message so far as it had in any degree 
been grasped by the holy men of earth. 

He was, moreover, steeped in the poetry of the 
Old Testament writings. His evident familiarity with 
them must have grown out of long and loving study ; 



God or Christ. 101 

while his readiness to quote and apply relieves him, 
in all his iconoclastic work, from any charge of nar- 
rowness or jealousy. He was, too, Hebraistic in the 
character of his mind, as all his expressions show; 
and the bond of sympathy with the spiritual singers 
and prophets must, of necessity, have been great. He 
was not so. much unlike, as more than they. What 
came to them in glimpses, was to him a steadily shin- 
ing light. He asserted from daily consciousness what 
they barely hinted at in rare and only half-understood 
moments. But the poetry that colored his whole life, 
and ran through his every utterance, was a part of 
that Hebrew heritage which he shared in common 
with them. 

But the bent of his genius, the entire spirit of his 
work, was away from all such purely ethical methods. 
Indeed, Jesus has been as widely misunderstood by 
those who have narrowed him to the position of a 
merely moral teacher, as by those who have persisted 
in limiting Christianity to considerations of doctrinal 
and ecclesiastical efficacy. He found the principles 
of morality, largely the same in all times and under 
the various national systems of religion, already ex- 
pressed with sufficient pith and clearness. Their 
demands would not generally differ from those he 
as a moralist should make. Incidentally, he added a 
few, or put in more comprehensive form others 
which were vastly older than his own system; but 
this was not his object. The reason why they did 
not live up to their laws, why the work of the wise 
teachers they worshipped had become of none effect, 



102 JEcce Spiritus. 

was not because they needed more or more perfect 
moral precepts, but because something else, vastly 
more radical and effective than ethical principles 
alone can ever be, was wanted. Their code was well- 
nigh perfect ; but it was written in stone, while he 
stopped at nothing short of a heart newly made over 
from the springs and beginnings of conduct to the 
crowning expressions of the entire nature of man in 
vital fusion with the highest. He had no greater 
charge to bring against their law than that it left 
them dead. It was good as far as it went ; and he 
was glad to have it constitute a part of the ground- 
work, the bedplate, of his own more sufficient minis- 
try. The principles of morality are largely the prop- 
erty of the race, and the especial work of no one in 
particular ; and he does not need to proceed much 
further in this direction. But he does see that, while 
nearly perfect as a written system, Hebraism was 
abortive as a living and practical reality; that ade- 
quate motives were wanting to its proper exercise; 
that, in short, it was largely a dead letter on the 
statute books of the State. It was his to supply the 
needed soul to this shapely but corpse-like body. 
The law might stand, but, as one of the incidental 
effects of his own more positive work, it must come 
to new and larger significance. Spirituality is every- 
where seen in synrpathy with the highest morality, 
but it is infinitely more than morality. It is often 
the most ethical of men who deny both spirit and 
God. But Jesus, finding so valuable a legal system, ac- 
cepted its letter, at the same time that, as with every- 



God or Christ. 103 

thing else, he filled it out with the spirit of his own 
diviner work. It remains, however, theirs, not his. 
The characteristic bent of his own calling must not 
for a moment be confounded with the more super- 
ficial sphere of the projmets. " It is written in your 
law," he says, — not ours, nor mine, but yours. 

All this was in perfect keeping with the brave and 
comprehensive task he had set himself to do, which 
was nothing short of the most positive assertion of 
the one essential truth of God, joined to the most 
catholic and liberal spirit toward every form and ut- 
terance of it, however partial, which it had taken in 
men's minds. The singleness of his aim in nowise 
suffered from the breadth and inclusiveness of his 
vision. It was no truer of him that his eye penetrated 
to the supreme centre of truth than that it rested as 
well on the outermost rim of its vast circumference. 
And this is the one fact, taken in connection with the 
quality of his message, and the utter thoroughness 
with which it was carried out, which has given him 
his perpetuity of influence in the face of infinite per- 
version. Least of all disputatious, he saw and used 
everything which in any degree made for the estab- 
lishment of his end. He was eminently, though not 
narrowly, practical. For, while directly at war with 
the logical results of the Jewish law in social and in- 
dividual life, he could yet declare that he had come 
not to destroy, but to fulfil its unseen or forgotten 
spirit. He saw alike the surface and the centre, but it 
was the latter alone that he kept always in view. 

It is this method or spirit of Jesus which the Jews 



104 Ecce Spiritus. 

found it most difficult to understand. He was so near 
to them, and yet strangely alien to their most cherished 
convictions; so sympathetic with, and so much a part 
of them, and yet, withal, so uncompromisingly antag- 
onistic. It was a Jew speaking to them in the com- 
mon tongue, with the very language of their own 
sacred fathers ; and yet what a strange, incomprehensi- 
ble message ! Abraham, Moses, David, or Isaiah might 
be heard in what he said ; but his strain was not of 
them, and never rested with their words. Nay, more, 
it said nothing about himself, except as he chose to 
consider himself in the light of an instrument or a re- 
flection or a something outside himself which makes 
for righteousness in all men. It was not his own 
strong individuality which pushed his opinions, but 
his opinions, vitally fused and peculiarly imperative, 
which made him what he was. The strength of his 
endowment was in the intense and personal relations 
he enjoyed with God. With him, it is everywhere 
God that must be considered. They must not even 
call him good. There is only one good, and that the 
Father. 

But here the spirit of Jesus has been equally mis- 
understood by the Church, which has since stood, to a 
great degree, in the precise attitude of the people of 
his time. It cannot harmonize with the radical method 
of his thought, but stops on the surface, refusing to un- 
derstand the obvious intent of all his words. It has 
said, and still says, that historical Christianity is a truer 
criterion of Jesus' intentions than the primitive and 
unformed spirit itself, which stands to-day just as it 



God or Christ. 105 

did when first perverted, as plain and as much a first- 
hand source of authority to us as to the earliest synod 
that ever met. It says practically, in answer to the 
question what the Christian Church is to effect, that 
the end and object of all is Christ. He taught a per- 
verted humanity, a way of salvation, and a possible 
heavenly state ; and all this is only another way of say- 
ing Christ. He taught himself, whom we are to ac- 
cept, to live with and for, to cat and drink, to serve in 
some especial sense, as Head and Lord and King. 

Jesus, on the contrary, insisted on one thing, the 
immanence and mightiness of God. And his concep- 
tion of Deity was not only strong and forceful, but 
also new and original. There was no real God in the 
universe until him. He had neither faith nor fellow- 
ship in the abstract Jehovah of Jewish thought, a be- 
ing relegated to a realm so far distant from any actual, 
every-day comprehension as to be practically of no ac- 
count save as an intellectual conception. This being, 
whose name could have no place in their common 
speech, for fear that utterance would contaminate its 
sacredness, to mention whom in any conscious sense 
of human relationship became a sacrilege, was no 
part of the paternal discovery that Jesus made out of 
the needy and loving depths of his own soul. The 
blasphemy of his familiar expressions of nearness and 
love startled them into fear and hatred. It was not 
anything he claimed for himself, in his assumption of 
the Christ, that aroused their opposition, but his un- 
righteous handling of a name they themselves hardly 
dared to speak. The pure, living, regnant theism of 



106 JScce Spiritus. 

Jesus was the chief cause of all the bitterness that 
assailed him. He was there, not to supplement the 
statute-books in their bald statements of the fact of 
Deity, but by reason of what he himself knew of God, 
because of some positive certainty. It was a different 
God, as well as one realized in his own consciousness, 
which he brought to their knowledge ; an entire change 
of attitude toward Deity, and the relations which man 
sustains to him. Before Jesus there was a God, but 
no God-companionship, no genuine and tender com- 
munion. He took religion out of its abstract relations, 
and made it living and effective. He not only en- 
larged, but realized the highest conceptions of Hebrew 
faith. It was not so much the might as the nearness 
of God; not his power, but his presence, that he saw 
and rejoiced in. lie first established the family rela- 
tion in religion. Father and Son are the words he 
loves best. He revels in his own assertion of sonship, 
coining his highest title out of the simplest realities of 
his daily communion with God and man. He could 
afford to ignore their short-sighted charge of bringing 
God down to men, since he was only conscious of the 
effort to lift men up to God. He was not here to 
state, but to realize; not to define God, but to deify 
man. It was a larger, not a less divinity that he saw. 
And he saw it with a single eye, and with the one sole 
aim of bringing men to the point in spiritual expe- 
rience where he himself stood. He first prayed, and 
set that divinest prerogative of man's nature in its true 
light, not as a delegated and formal function, but the 
nearest and simplest and most natural exj>ression of 



God or Christ. 107 

human life. With a breath of his honest and manly 
courage, he blew away cant and script and priestly in- 
tervention, and said, Let the coming be heart to heart. 
He taught God first and last of all, keeping himself at 
the same time as far as possible out of sight. They 
had no claim through him, but a privilege and duty 
in and of themselves. It was his aim to awaken them 
to the life in the developed possibilities of which lie 
the necessities and certainties of spiritual communion. 
He called out the God in them, so long dormant, that 
now revealed to them their true selves. Then he as 
quickly and silently as possible withdrew. 

In the light of these facts, the answer to the ques- 
tion as to what constitutes the true Christian is sim- 
ple and sure. Xot he who worships Christ, but he 
who worships the Father. Every earnest, honest 
God-worshipper, even if he never utters, nay, even if 
he never heard of, the name of Christ, is a Christian. 
He is and must be one with Jesus, amenable to all his 
methods, and inspired toward the peculiar kind of ex- 
perience which dominated all his development. A 
chance, then, for the nameless, Christless God-wor- 
shipper of every land and time! The ban of the 
churches is dissolved, and every childlike heart comes 
back to the consciousness of a genuine and tender 
communion. Nay, more, even he who, while at peace 
in conscious nearness to the Father, believes himself 
lost and utterly unfellowshipped in the great com- 
munion where he would gladly bear his part, now 
comes to stand beside the "lonely Jesus,'' admitted 
into that inner, smaller circle which is presided over 



108 JEcce Spiritus. 

by his spirit. He who, in the tenderest of religious 
relations with God, feels himself forced to renounce 
the name which has been burdened with so much nar- 
rowness and falsity, again rejoices in the title of 
Christian, from which no bigotry without and no 
honest scruples within need longer estrange him. If 
he knows, loves, serves God, he is the only Christian. 
He may drop the word from his vocabulary, if he 
will : he cannot lose the fact. He is what Jesus was, 
and the heir of all his influence, the rightful owner of 
every privilege his name confers. 

There is something singular in this word, which has 
been so long an all-powerful shibboleth in the world. 
It has been of vast import in the history of the past 
eighteen centuries, ranging in significance from geo- 
graphical and political distinctions to the arbitration 
of personal opinion and experience. Its force has 
been felt not only in the privacy of the heart, but 
in the entire course of human development. It has 
even gone beyond the mysterious line that sepa- 
rates life and death, and laid exclusive claim to 
the prizes of eternity. It has been secularized, and 
prostituted to a thousand uses, and stands to-day in 
the minds of millions of people the test of worthiness 
here and happiness hereafter. And all this in the 
face of the fact of the utter want of assumption on 
the part of him in whose honor it is worn. To be a 
follower of Jesus is with him to worship God, to be 
consciously and vitally related to spiritual things. 
The objective point in the distinction is God, not 
Christ. There is neither desire nor demand on the 



God or Christ. 109 

part of Jesus that his name should be used as a 
watchword, except so far as it may be helpful and 
inspiring. His is the way, the truth, and the life: 
make them ours, and we shall, like him, be one with 
God; and nothing further is required even for the 
fullest Christian fellowship. 

It has been this which has occasioned the frequent 
willingness on the part of conscientious thinkers to 
renounce the name altogether; to exalt comparative 
religion over the claims of any narrow and sectional 
school. The significance of the name has been 
stretched too far; and the spirit of Jesus, offended 
in the literalism of his would-be followers, transfers 
its sympathy to those who in brave honesty stand 
entirely apart from the perverted symbol. But the 
word is, after all, but the body of something which 
the later, fuller Christian thought labors to fulfil. It 
is the bald literalism which no completer spirit can 
afford utterly to ignore. The spirit can get outward, 
and cleanse and purify and make new the distorted 
symbol. The real Christianity exists, breathless and 
unnoted, beneath the worldly systems that have 
sprung up in its stead. It is the Hercules that will 
yet rise up to sweep out the Augean stables of its 
own great corruption at the hands of men. It will 
save all the false establishments, the work even of the 
make-shift synods, by the necessity it will force upon 
them to be born anew. It is the corrector of its own 
abuses, and hence a perennial power in the world. 

There is, however, one more test that Jesus gives, 
beyond the fact of intimate and loving relations with 



110 JEcce Spiritus. 

the Father ; and that is the possession of the Christ- 
like spirit. "If any man," says Paul, "have not the 
spirit of Christ, he is none of his." He cannot be a 
Christian, and keep any narrowness and exclusion. 
The spirit of Jesus is everywhere free and liberal. 
The method and object of his work alike forbid any 
fatal limitation of the term in its application to all 
truly religious beings. It is his work to bring to- 
gether, not to separate, the spiritual elements. There 
may be outward dissension in the day when the first 
struggle from lower to higher necessarily becomes a 
battle, but the ultimate drift of his influence is toward 
the reuniting; of all on the higher and more enduring 
plane. He is to re-establish the spiritual family, so 
long and cruelly divided. In him, all are to be one 
in God. 

The radicalism of Christianity more fully appears 
when we pass from its relations to the ages of tradi- 
tionalism from which it sprung to the present, and 
see how broad is its essential sympathy with the hon- 
est iconoclast of to-day. 

We feel that Jesus now, as of old, is with every 
conscientious protest, every profound yearning for 
free, untrammelled light and life. The simple bond 
of brotherhood that welcomed all who were willing 
to live his life, without the slightest reference to doc- 
trinal qualification, reaches down the centuries of 
inevitable human formulation to us, gathering all 
earnest souls into the capacious fold of Christ; but 
only the positive and constructive, only the reverent 
and comprehensive. Radicalism too often is born 



God or Christ. Ill 

out of the exclusiveness that dwarfs and kills. There- 
fore, it must have no sneers and no reprisals, but open 
arms and the sweep of the horizons in its outlook. It 
must be, like the radicalism of Jesus, a cry for more, 
not less, a progress from negation to fuller affirma- 
tion. The higher form is always the more inclusive, 
and the drift of divine things is never toward a nar- 
rowing, but rather a broadening out. 

But there is this never to be forgotten in the posi- 
tion of the independent, in the student of comparative 
theology who scorns all names in his sufficient theism, 
that, acknowledge it or not, as he may, he is yet, in all 
his spirituality, the heir of the Christian centuries. 
He may say, and say truly, that his religious expe- 
rience is so vital and personal, his relations with God 
so direct and conscious, as to remain intact, even if the 
Bible were lost, and the whole Christian record proved 
a myth. But when he inquires into himself for the 
sources of his spiritual insight, when he asks whence 
came the fulness of God knowledge which makes this 
ultimate independence possible, he is met by the fact 
that he is what he is, because Christianity, which has 
modified the thought and life of the race, was born in 
him, and was unconsciously absorbed in all the pro- 
cesses of his education. Enough of the spiritual princi- 
ple of Jesus inheres even in the falsity and superficial- 
ness of ordinary interpretation to have made transmis- 
sible all the higher expressions and experience of our 
race. Christianity has been so far forth true to its pur- 
pose that it is in some sort possible in these days to live 
without it. That is to say, one can be, nay, must be, 



112 Jficce Spiritus. 

genuinely religious and like Christ spiritually, if he 
thinks and lives at all on the higher j)lane, by reason 
of the now structural, the inborn and unconscious bent 
which the ages of Christian influence have supplied. 
He cannot eradicate the fact from his nature, though 
he may have lost the original source of its operation. 
Jesus has so far taken possession of humanity that, 
even if he were historically disproved, he would ever} r - 
where be found actually present. This is because the 
real Christianity is deeper and more essential than the 
apparent one. It is the Christianity born in us that 
thus defies the more superficial one of the creeds. 

The fact is, Christianity has fathered all our radical- 
ism. Out of its own truest impulse has come the 
courage to reject a symbol falsely interpreted. It has 
tinctured our hereditary thought, given us new eyes 
and minds and motives, until, at last, so near in to the 
centre of being does it lie, we neither know it from 
ourselves, nor suspect that it is speaking even in our 
honest protest or denial. It is written all over our 
history, and in the more imperishable life of the soul. 
It had its birth anew when we were born, and in us 
answers as of old, with its unquenchable fire, the flame 
of society's fagot. We can go far, but not far enough 
to escape it. The elevation and honesty of all things 
confess it. Only the charlatan and the depraved are 
without something of its saving power. Nominal 
independence of it may be virtual reliance upon it, 
while acceptance of it breathes in every true theist's 
prayer. Wherever men come to God in genuine and 
conscious communion, it is witnessed anew. It is rad- 



God or Christ. 113 

ical, at the roots of being, because it is the only ade- 
quate conception of life, the only actual realization of 
God. In these two spheres, of God and self, it has 
found the double solution that has ever eluded the 
search of man. It makes plain the cause and the con- 
tingent, and the arithmetic of the soul is henceforth 
within the power of man to solve. 



CHAPTER VIIL 

DOCTRIXE YS. PERSONAL ENDOWMENT. 

We have found that the answer to our question, 
What is that of which Jesus stands the representative, 
resides in the emphasis he everywhere puts upon spir- 
ituality. This he enforces as originating cause in all 
things, as a sufficient philosophy for all the needs and 
problems of life, and as an ever-present destiny, here 
and now and everywhere and always. 

But the statement becomes bald and inadequate, a 
mere formula, until we take a step further, and ob- 
serve how it is that he illustrates this vast principle, 
so as to take it out of the sphere of abstract things 
into that of living reality. It does not answer the 
requirements of a supreme mission, such as Jesus had, 
to say merely that he taught spirituality. A man 
can be a theorist in every other department but that 
of life; but the minute a theory finds acceptance 
there, it begins to take definite and vital form as a 
part of his very self : the higher it is, the more cer- 
tain that he will henceforth enforce not it, but him- 
self. Especially is this true of spirituality, which 
is the crowning and all-inclusive verity, the only pos- 
sible reception of which becomes not a statement, but 
an embodiment of itself. 



Doctrine vs. Personal Endowment. 115 

Our needs here being not abstract, but practical, it 
follows that something more than the most conclusive 
statement of truth is essential to their satisfaction. 
Even heaven, with its perfection, does not wholly 
meet the present case, which has a want as well de- 
fined and legitimate as any which the future is des- 
tined to create and meet. Jesus saw the folly of 
abstractions, the inadequacy of the most perfect state- 
ment of truth. The best conscience of the Hebrew 
race, sifting down through a mass of trivial and cor- 
rupt history, had crystallized into dead forms and 
meaningless observances. Truth stood on the stat- 
ute-books, and there was worshipped. Association 
rendered the loftiest utterances of prophets and mor- 
alists and spiritual poets sacred, until the people had 
sunk so low as to wear bound upon their foreheads 
that which had little relation to their life. Not only 
was the real heart eaten out of religion, so that 
spiritual want went unsatisfied, but there also began 
to appear the danger of a positive moral insincerity. 
The priest himself was deluded in deceiving others, 
positively demoralized in the negative wrong he did 
to them. Jesus marked this present death resulting 
from formalism, and, further, the irresistible tendency 
of human thought in general to render truth value- 
less by converting it into the dead letter of a set, 
prescribed system. He saw the danger of all del- 
egated authority, and indeed especially in spiritual 
things, and accordingly sought not only to impart 
a life which should be unorganized and perennial 
in its freshness in his own time, but to enunciate 



116 Ecce Sjriritus. 

a principle which might ever act untrammelled on the 
minds and hearts of men. 

It is not necessary to pause here upon those evident 
perversions which came into the Church as soon as the 
impression of the personal influence, the spirit, of 
Jesus, had become faint enough to allow of organiza- 
tion. That evangelical Christianity is widely sepa- 
rated, both in spirit and teaching, from the pure, 
simple principle of Jesus, — however true it may be to 
a post-apostolic Church, and however serviceable, in 
want of a better, — even its candid adherents them- 
selves admit. The Jewish system was the strongest 
religious organization ever seen, and Jesus had studied 
this in full operation and completeness of result. He 
saw doctrine deified on every hand, and the question 
of right merged into that of legality, until there was 
no room left for either genuine rectitude or conscious 
spiritual life. Religion was but a faint germ of pos- 
sibility in the hard shell of formalism in which it was 
enclosed. 

He was necessarily forced away from all this. The 
exigencies of his own peculiar work and ideas would 
have stood one side, opposed and antipodal, even if the 
barefaced failure of Judaism to effect any worthy re- 
sult had not been plain to see. From the side of ex- 
perience, as well as from his own truest instincts, came 
the command to teach no system of doctrines, to make 
no formulation of living truth into the dead letter of a 
creed. The disciples were to spread his gospel among 
all nations ; but an understanding of that gospel as it 
was in him gives ample denial to the supposition that 



Doctrine vs. Personal Endowment. 117 

he even dreamed of an ecclesiastical hierarchy founded 
on his name. He did indeed see the danger of this, 
the inevitable human tendency to monopolize the per- 
son of the announcer of truth for purposes of outward 
aggrandizement ; and it was especially to prevent this 
very thing, which afterward took place, that he left 
his truth unformulated, in the hope that it might rest 
in the heart and life. He knew the very fact that he 
had set his influence against the dead forms of his own 
day would furnish future generations a lever with 
which to lift themselves to what they would consider 
purer phases of organized power. He foresaw that his 
name might readily become a catchword, about which 
to cluster fresh abuses of the spirit which he lived to 
liberate. Often and again, he beseeches them not to 
be deceived with false prophetship, brought in his 
name, to the establishment of new applications of his 
teaching. Indeed, his forecast of the future, and his 
fine understanding of the immense leverage there is in 
a truly good and popular name, evince great natural 
acumen as well as comprehensive observation of life. 

It is difficult for us to understand the rigor of He- 
brew ritualism, the iron rigidity and mechanical com- 
pleteness, the absolute finality of its unquestioned let- 
ter. But the moment it is seen what utter spiritual 
lifelessness went side by side with its perfection of 
form, the aptness and timeliness of Jesus' word and 
work are realized. One needs to go back into the 
repressive atmosphere of the time, and live and strug- 
gle and surfer and starve as men's souls did then, to 
appreciate the coming of his great, free, light-loving, 



118 JScce Spiritus. 

and life-bringing nature. He can only approximate to 
this by a poor comparison of the life to-day, and an 
observation of how far the honesty, the faith, and the 
freedom even of our time are crushed out by the 
unyielding systems of the Churches. He will then 
come to see that the essential principle of primitive 
Christianity, which is the only power that can prune 
off these false growths and excrescences, is just as 
possible and potent to-day as ever. 

If not so, he will ask, would not Christianity be 
outgrown ? It must be this, out of ordinary sight, and 
least suspected by those who arrogate to themselves 
the sole possession of the Christian name, that has kept 
Christianity, in spite of all perversions, still powerful 
and respected. Men are too much burdened in their 
progress to long carry worthless treasures. The house- 
hold gods, disproved and put to shame through pa- 
tient trial of credulity, are soon thrown away. But, 
notwithstanding all of Christianity that has been de- 
nied, there is something in it which the most critical 
cannot help reverencing, as well as something which, 
even in extreme dilution, is able to continue and bear 
up under a mass of falsity and error. The Church 
has changed, and is still at war among its members. 
The papal and Protestant arms divide, and know not 
of the doings of each ; while the unnoted or forgotten 
heart of Christianity beats faintly underneath. This 
was the supreme test of its power, to endure unspent, 
and with perennial possibility of renewed and renew- 
ing purity, through all the ages of misconception. 



Doctrine vs. Personal Endowment. 119 

And it is this undercurrent, this buried river of un- 
expended influence, that bursts the surface now and 
then to show that Christianity is a deathless adapta- 
bility to the needs of life. It speaks to our time, and 
summons it, as of old, to freedom and freshness of 
spiritual being. But it does so distinctively in oppo- 
sition to everything formal. It must remain a princi- 
ple, a spirit, a life.. It will body itself forth in us, but 
will not itself be bodied. It will tend toward forma- 
tive results, but will itself remain unfettered. We 
can cage the bird, but are by no means sure of catch- 
ing his song. There are some things which cannot be 
imprisoned. Religion has been nicely locked behind 
inclusive dogmatical bars, but the spirit prisoner has 
oftenest refused to sing. 

And this, too, the higher up we go. Comte's re- 
ligion of humanity, or Confucius' worship of ances- 
tors, or the Moslem's faith of Mahomet, will find a 
statement far more readily than this spirituality, ut- 
terly unsensuous, of Jesus; although, doubtless, each 
of these may have at heart a certain reality, which we 
should lose in any attempt to deduce them from their 
most elaborate verbal record. 

Hence it was that Jesus absolutely ignored system- 
atic statement, announcing neither creed nor dogma, 
and making no formal test of faith. Every saving ut- 
terance on his part is the statement of a principle 
broad as life itself, and, like life, impossible of tabu- 
lation. The heart, the mind, the life, can hold and 
transmit it, — the books, in more than a slight degree, 
never. If Jesus had attempted this too common 



120 Ecce Spiritus. 

experiment, and left us as his only legacy such a sys- 
tem as we now have attributed to him, it would be 
seen that, when the form and finality of a set doctrine 
had been worn away by the attrition of modern pro- 
gressive thought, there would be nothing left to save 
and rejuvenate it. 

It is manifest, at the outset, that religion must be a 
soul, not a body. There must be no sign of limita- 
tion about it. It is essentially the heart of life, the 
unseen centre of perennial interests, and is itself peren- 
nial. It recognizes the practical need of organization, 
but on a vastly different basis from that which the 
Church has commonly held to be essential. Jesus him- 
self organized his followers for the spreading of his 
grand but eminently simple gospel of life, without 
one reference to dogmatic qualifications or technical 
means of impressiveness, but with every insistence on 
themselves as living and practical embodiments of 
that which they did not so much have, as, in a truer 
and grander sense, was to possess them. The test of 
their discipleship was this mastery of a mighty life- 
principle in their members, their words and deeds. 
The entire sphere of their influence was to be com- 
mensurate with this. It was the lodgement of the 
truth in them, as they had seen it regnant in the 
whole nature of Jesus, that was to send the gospel 
home, not to the thought, the intellectual allegiance 
alone, but to the lives of men. 

It was the failure of religious organization on the 
basis of dogma that Jesus saw and insisted upon first 
of all, — the inadequacy, nay, the positive harm and 



Doctrine vs. Personal Endowment. 121 

wrong, of demanding, in beings born into distinctively 
different temperaments and intellectual leanings, one 
and the same expression of faith. He would bring 
individuality of thought into sympathy of life and 
effort, and organize on the basis of work, charity, 
helpfulness, and peace. He was no impracticable 
dreamer to ignore entirely the need of combined and 
outwardly equip ped effort ; but it was humanity he 
considered, and no sect in its sinfulness, its virtual 
denial of him, setting itself apart and condemning the 
honest dogmatic difference of brothers united to them 
by a common spiritual bond. His idea of organiza- 
tion had in it nothing hostile to the most marked 
individuality, and his life does not record a single in- 
stance of difference in opinion rebuked by him. The 
persecutors for opinion's sake have served the Christ 
of their own hearts, rather than the Jesus who 
preached the spirit so unassumingly, and with such 
almost utter absence of doctrinal limitations. 

So far as we can see, there would be nothing incon- 
sistent in any form or ordinance which remained such 
in the mind of the Christian. But no one saw with 
clearer demonstration than Jesus the danger there is 
in these things. He knew human nature and its 
irresistible tendencies, and had marked how the 
efficacy went out of the formularies the minute they 
were considered saving. And then came the convic- 
tion, arrived at intellectually, as well as instinctive 
with him, that the truth untrammelled, and left to 
have free course and sway, is better than the best 
statement fossilized into a dead form. His organizar 



122 Ecce Spiritus. 

tion, therefore, was one of mutual and charitable 
helpfulness in spreading the one true Life, rather 
than in compulsory allegiance to a fixed and inelastic 
creed. In his system, if we may give such a name to 
the Christianity of Jesus, he evinces no ambition to 
settle all the questions of the universe ; and any one 
may well suspect any assumed Christian catechism 
which goes outside the sphere of spiritual things. 
The final conclusion of the last scientist will not be 
found to be less, but more in harmony with the entire 
teaching of Jesus. His spirituality can never enlarge 
as a conception, except in the comprehension of man: 
it is, and was, the one and only way back to God and 
life. But the boundaries of man's knowledge in the 
sphere of God's creation cannot widen out to such 
proportions as not to be in accord with this unwritten 
but necessarily limitless creed. Jesus has and need 
have no quarrel with his Father's universe at any 
point of its progressive development. It does not 
tend away from, but ever toward, the centre of his 
own revelation. 

It is here that all the prescribed faiths have failed, 
in their fear of new facts, and the inevitable want of 
elasticity in their fixed statement. Each has grasped 
a truth, and quickly shut it away from all possible 
co-ordination into the wholeness of truth. The creeds 
have come to us for selection, largely as a matter of 
choice. Which, on the whole, suits us best ? Personal 
peculiarity answers for each ; but when the choice has 
not resulted, as so often happens, in the fatal zeal of 
bigotry and narrow partisanship, the churched believer, 



Doctrine vs. Personal Endowment. 123 

still unsatisfied in his exclusion, has been forced to 
steal the needed blessings of the complemental creeds. 
But Jesus sees that there is only one religion among 
the multiform theologies . God is one, and there is 
only one communion, worship, service. The spirit of 
it must ever be the same, however much individuality 
may modify its expression. He knows how quickly 
the influence of the polemic passes, his fabric of un- 
erring logic shattered in the movement of the world's 
progress. But the unspoken spirituality, which as 
a principle of life lies fallow in germinal possibility 
in every human heart, responding ever and again to 
the only touch that can move and inspire it, is as 
indestructible as being itself. It can never be left 
nor outgrown, but ever leads just in advance of man's 
loftiest attainments in knowledge. 

To have said that Jesus refused to be a theologian 
means much as to the method as well as to the sub- 
stance of his message. Thus, it would not be adequate 
to say that he taught spirituality. Without giving up 
any of the traditional reverence for the teacher, it 
may yet be said that his work is by no means the 
highest. From time immemorial, he who has exer- 
cised this function has received peculiar respect ; and 
surely in these days, when knowledge of all kinds is 
everywhere exalted, he suffers from no danger of a 
diminution of influence. Nevertheless there is a side 
of life upon which the importance of teaching, merely 
as such, has been vastly overrated. The instructor 
in morals or religion, or even in educational matters, 
must ever be subordinated to the inspirer. His very 



124 Ecce Spiritus. 

position as such, at the outset, puts him at a certain 
disadvantage with those who feel themselves lacking 
in the excellence and acquirement that he represents, 
whereas the unconscious influence of a position that 
assumes nothing technical, and only rests its hope of 
irnpressiveness on the natural and living expressions 
of itself, is one of the most irresistible powers for 
good. 

Indeed, it is here that so many of our means of 
culture are cheated of their end. Those capable of 
moving, inspiring, touching with new eyes and hearts 
and minds and motives, are few in number compared 
with those who can merely impart separate facts. 
Knowledge can never be imparted, but only the im- 
petus to knowledge. One can really learn of another 
only the method and spirit of his learning. Nothing 
comes out from us which we have not first made our 
own, and intellectual possession is something that no 
one can give us by proxy. The presence of another's 
aspiration or ideal is not important to us because any 
part of it can be given in exchange for our attention, 
but sinrply because it stimulates and guides us to the 
creation and consciousness of our own ideal. It is 
not so much a positive factor as a negative, tending 
toward positive results in us. The decline and degen- 
eracy of the Jewish Church were begun in the day 
when the expounder of the law usurped the place of 
the inspired prophet. And in any day, when the 
mere teacher, the sermonizer, the religious logician, is 
everywhere sought and reverenced, a low, mechanical, 
and unspiritual outlook will not be far distant. 



Doctrine vs. Personal Endoicment. 125 

Jesus sinks in our estimation the moment we make 
him a mere teacher. That he was such, incidentally 
and accidentally, is true. But that one who found a 
world starving, spiritually, under a most exact legal 
system and a punctilious observance of scholastic dis- 
tinctions, should make no attempt at systematic ex- 
jDOsition, might naturally be expected. And every 
attempt since to evolve out of his memorials an exact 
and final statement of doctrines has lamentably failed. 
Rival movements have sprung up, and made of the 
Church's work of evangelization a petty theologic 
warfare that has only served to perj^etuate the bitter- 
ness of sect. 

Jesus struck deeper than this. He assumed no ped- 
agogic gown, stepped upon no rostrum, and accepted 
no acolytes that were not able to live the life he did. 
The hand of anointing had been laid within ; and he 
had little to say, but vast life-issues to work out and 
enforce. His first and only disputation was in the 
temple; but all his positive — for he was ever grandly 
positive — and authoritative utterances were given in 
the fields or the living-rooms of humble people, into 
the sphere of which his earliest inclinations led him. 
Indeed, there has been nothing more painful to the 
countless Christians who have looked for light from 
him amid the inadequacies and cruelties of the creeds, 
than this paucity of utterance. Why did he say so 
little, where so much was needed? And yet more 
would have been too much. The minute he had 
formulated anything, we should stop there, and there 
would be no longer any hope of life. He gives us 



126 Ecce Spiritus. 

the germinal truth, the all-inclusive principle, not in 
its abstraction, nor yet in its complete logical state- 
ment, if such a thing were possible of a living and 
eternally progressive reality, but in vital personal 
fusion. Make the life yours, and you have it all. 
But Jesus declines to do the work for us, and utterly 
refuses to surround the one pure spiritual influence 
the world has had with the dangers of attempted 
definition. Christianity must not be caught in a mesh 
of words, but must remain a life influence, tending 
toward life. We hear the sound of the spirit, and 
know absolutely of its reality and power, but happily 
cannot tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth, 
except as these things are in God. 

Jesus cared not where he gathered his congrega- 
tion. Indeed, it was always around him; and his 
method was the yet untried one of nature. He put 
his heart close to the bare, empty spots in human 
experience, and whispered low, or uttered forth in 
silence, the living language of that answer which 
had been wrought out in him. He did, in truth, 
enlighten and enlarge the comprehension of men, 
and infinitely elevate their outlook; but he was not 
a dogmatist, and had little to do with the teacher's 
superficial methods. He struck at the roots of being, 
using such instruction as the situation unconsciously 
required. But he was peculiar in this : that, so far 
as he was a teacher, he addressed himself to the very 
quick of conscious experience. He had a wonderful 
faculty, rare among the saviors, of keeping down to 
the vital need. He reveals himself in the fact, not 



Doctrine vs. Personal Endowment. 127 

in the elaboration of his message. He addresses the 
experience and the motives with a subtler logic than 
that of the intellect, which the intellect nevertheless 
confirms and strengthens at every point. 

Jesns is the only character of history who im- 
pressed himself deeply upon human thought and life, 
and has had an enduring claim to grateful remem- 
brance simply by reason of what he teas. Unlike 
others, he cannot be contemplated outside of his 
work, nor can his work be separated from him. His 
work had become personal, and himself a doubly 
energized personality. Then for the first time in 
history appeared a man who was himself, utterly, 
wholly, unreservedly. The message he bore had 
become a revelation in and through himself, so that, 
while he in no sense elaborates spirituality, he yet 
lives and enforces it. What he said has value as 
teaching, but his mission was so close to life that it 
can be fully received only by some degree of spiritual 
contact. Spirituality is the only thing you cannot 
teach. The higher the subject, the farther is it re- 
moved from prescribed methods of instruction. We 
can teach letters, but not life. The latter impresses 
us more directly, turning mental processes into mo- 
tives. We can impart all symbols, types, and illus- 
trations of life, but not that illusive but most central 
reality which inheres in and appeals to consciousness 
alone. Consciousness can be quickened, awakened, 
formed, but not informed from any outside source. 
It can gain everything, but be given nothing. What 
another has, can never be ours ; but we may be so 
moved by him as in time to possess like realities. 



128 JEcce Spiritus. _ 

Manifestly, one can teach nothing of God, except 
that which he himself knows; and it is one of the 
truisms of spiritual experience that what we know of 
God we can never tell. Our neighbors will in count- 
less ways discover the fact, which we shall shrink 
from even the attempt at uttering, just in proportion 
to the genuineness of our knowledge. Language is 
a wonderful vehicle in the hands of a master, but it 
utterly fails to circumscribe the facts of conscious- 
ness. The nomenclature of a nation is solidified long 
before its best experience comes; so that, in the 
dearth of fitting words, consciousness must needs find 
other and subtler means of communication. 

Even in the sphere of the commoner affections there 
is no language of the heart. What two people, keenly 
sympathetic, feel in communion, is revealed in no 
other way than by a silence which each, neverthe- 
less, fully understands. The word of intensest mean- 
ing would strike like a chill of avowed unworthiness 
on that eloquent stillness. Acquaintances, meeting, 
find no difficulty in expressing their formal interest 
in each other's welfare; but the nearer companion- 
ship, that is parent of the glory and despair of life, 
goes unspoken, in spite of all the novels and poems 
to the contrary. It would be indeed a hopeless task 
for him who would attempt to convey in words the 
deepest that he knows and feels. 

There can, therefore, be no school of the real the- 
ologies. What men have known of God is not in the 
books, but in the soul. What Jesus knew of God is 
not in the gospel statement, nor did he ever intend 



Doctrine vs. Personal Endowment. 129 

that it should be. It was in him ; and we see it, feel 
it, know it wherever and whenever we meet him. In 
this sense, and it is the only essential one, Jesus has 
been given us in the Gospels with utter faithfulness. 
Though the writers erred occasionally in their inter- 
pretation, they never failed in the man. His message 
and meaning always shine out clearly through the 
partialness of their comprehension. The true science 
of God is in the processions of the soul. Experience 
knows, while our intellectual statements only hint at 
Him. Spirituality alone reveals and commands the 
spiritual ; and, for this reason, Jesus came a man of 
few words. Surface and show, and the elaboration 
thereof, were all around him; and he stood uncom- 
promisingly for a realization of that about which 
others only talk, and for an attestation of it which 
could never be perverted by the limits of a definition. 



CHAPTER IX. 



THE SELFHOOD OF JESUS. 



Not to incur the charge of abstractness, let us illus- 
trate the practical sufficiency of this method of Jesus. 
There are, in general, two ways in which goodness 
may be impressed upon others. We may draw nice 
distinctions and so define and exalt ethical standards 
as to create an intellectual appreciation and under- 
standing of them ; and this is good and helpful in a 
world so eager for helps as ours. But the goodness 
about which we ourselves say and know least, so near 
home to the modesty of personal possession does it lie, 
is the only real and potent mover of men to virtue. 
"No one knows, nor ever will know in this world, the 
sum of this silent influence. Personal virtue is never 
without its effect : it is felt everywhere and always ; 
while abstract morality, the assent of the intellect, 
has been too often divorced from adequate fulfilment 
to longer remain the centre toward which wise effort 
is directed. It is not what men get hold of, but what 
gets hold of them, that moves and saves. The mor- 
alist is the guide-board : the really good person is the 
savior. The soul of goodness and its real potency is 
in the being good. The ethical difficulty lies not in 
the theories, — the summaries and maps are all com- 



The Selfhood of Jesus. 131 

plete, — but in the need of that which shall drive virtue 
out of the mere intellectual assent into the realization 
of life. 

With such a consciousness of his mission, it is 
evident that Jesus could not long hold the truth he 
had at heart in its abstractness. Indeed, it early took 
possession of him, and became so interwoven into the 
texture, not of his beliefs, but of his being, that it was 
structural, that which in certain relations he thought 
of and meant when he spoke of himself. Publicly, 
when speaking authoritatively to those who doubted 
or misunderstood his claims, he ceased to be the 
individual, the Jesus of their commoner moods of 
intercourse, and became the embodiment of that 
which absorbed and filled his being. So far as man- 
kind and his relations to it are concerned, he speaks 
of himself as Spirituality. It was a higher, not a 
lower, personality that he found in the designation of 
that sphere of his nature which dominated all the rest. 
They were all so individual on the misleading plane 
of sense that he passed all the more readily from the 
first person to the third in the assertion of a higher 
selfhood in the spiritual. 

It must, however, be understood that Jesus lost 
nothing, but only completed his self, in this apparent 
renouncement. Least of all would he have given 
occasion for those false appeals, made in the name of 
religion, which call upon men to crush out and deny 
the self, as something inherently base and misleading. 
Jesus did not in the best sense deny himself when he 
took up the cross, but rose from the lower to the higher 



132 Ecce Spiritus. 

affirmation. He shows keen appreciation of individu- 
ality in others, studies and allows for it, and never un- 
derrates its legitimate influence. There never was a 
more thoroughly individual character than his, and 
never one that respected its peculiar self more, to the 
utter refusal of every thing which interfered Avith it. 
Self in its truer interpretation was what he was aiming 
at in all his work, to bring men back from aberrations 
to that supremely high and holy something in them- 
selves, which it is their especial prerogative to follow 
and fulfil. No false religion must for a moment inter- 
fere with this. There is neither beauty nor power in 
an abnegation toward any but positive ends. The 
true Christian can subordinate much, but relinquish 
nothing. One cannot follow God by giving up self, 
for it is the self that finds him. Jesus took no part in 
the old Jewish notions of sacrificial efficacy, — notions 
which speedily crept even into the system founded on 
his name in the later doctrine of the atonement. This 
we shall see more fully exemplified later on ; but, for 
the question in hand, it is sufficient to say that his 
progress is positive, from lower to higher, and not a 
negative throwing away of that which men are vitally 
and essentially, in order that something outside and 
arbitrary may take its place. 

Jesus had, as was necessary on his pinnacle and 
representative plane, two states of consciousness. 
Always, he was individual and personal, at his high- 
est, most truly and uncompromisingly himself; and 
ordinarily, in common intercourse, he was simply a 
man among men. In the second stage, when stand- 



The Selfhood of Jesus. 133 

ing face to face with sense and sin, and feeling the 
force of reaction, he was exalted into the higher range 
of his consciousness, so that he now spoke of his life, 
his being, as spirituality. But, even here, he would 
be no abstraction. In him, that spirituality had been 
bodied, absorbed into personality; and hence it acted 
and spoke and influenced in him. He was it, and it 
was he. He knew that abstract spirituality is impo- 
tent. When it is embodied and utters itself authorita- 
tively from within, it becomes impressive as a practical 
salvation. 

Furthermore, he sees that the man must come and 
go. The Christ of their deepest expectations could 
move them only momentarily, to be soon superseded 
by another savior. He accordingly identifies himself 
with his cause. When he says, "I am the light of 
the world," he intends no self-stultifying egotism ; but, 
projecting his personality into the higher range of 
consciousness, he means that he has become utterly 
spiritual, and that spirituality is the light of the 
world. When he says, "I am the way, the truth, and 
the life," he airs no self-conscious vanity, and claims 
no worship of himself. There is no other way, truth, 
or life but that which was dominating Jesus as he 
spoke. Because of this regnant consciousness of his, 
he can truthfully assert, "All things are delivered 
unto me of my Father," by reason of this privilege he 
enjoyed of participation in the highest. And from 
that exalted stand-point he can see, as can no one 
lower down, how true it is that the higher includes 
and comprehends all that is below it. " And no man 



134 Ecce Spiritus. 

knoweth the Son" — again the utterance of the spirit- 
ual consciousness, the truths of which men surely did 
not understand — " but the Father, neither knoweth 
any man the Father save the Son, and he to whomso- 
ever the Son will reveal him." Plainly, the creature 
who stands above, and representative of, every other 
creature in spirit and attainment, will be the only one 
who will approach a comprehension of the Creator. 
When Jesus speaks of himself as the Son, he almost 
invariably alludes to his higher spiritual conscious- 
ness, as the embodiment of that ideal toward which 
mankind is ever looking. He tells his disciples not to 
mention him to others as Jesus, the Christ, fearing 
the shibboleth that his name would shortly become. 
He asks nothing of men for himself, but everything 
for them and truth. What he stood for, lived, and 
died for, must not be lost to view in the worship of a 
sacred name. It was man-worship, and all other fast- 
ening of the soul's life to material symbols, which 
accounted for the too prevalent death. Standing as 
he does on the summit of human possibility, and con- 
scious alone of his divine mission, he sees only the 
supreme end, and everywhere ignores the instrument 
upon its human side. He moreover asks others also 
to overlook it. He demands this, even when he makes 
that simple but yet grand summing-up of his position, 
in answer to the doctrinal difficulties of Martha, "I 
am the resurrection and the life : he that believeth in 
me, though he were dead, yet shall he live ; and who- 
soever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." It 
is the spiritual life that cannot possibly die and that 



The Selfhood of Jesus. 135 

is here speaking to her. He means it in his command 
to the disciples to beware of false prophets, who shall 
say unto them that Christ is here or there, when he 
asserts that the coming of the Son of Man shall be not 
a localized nor a material affair in which they can rest 
their worship, but as lightning that cometh out of the 
east, and shineth even unto the west. The coming of 
the Son of Man will be that of spirituality, intangible 
and eternal, that lighteth up the entire sjDan of knowl- 
edge and of being. 

The same truth in continual reiteration runs through 
the Gospels. Jesus will be himself, at his best and 
truest. The Ego of the Son of Man is the utterance of 
humanity's highest. Spinoza catches the germinal 
truth of Christianity with far more insight and accu- 
racy than the mass of its professed representatives, 
when he says, "It is not absolutely necessary to know 
Christ after the flesh ; but it is otherwise when we 
speak of that Son of God, that is to say, that eternal 
wisdom of God which has manifested itself in all 
things, and more fully in the human soul, and, above 
all, in Jesus Christ." 

Let us not find fault with this position of Jesus, 
which may at first thought seem mystical and unsatis- 
factory. He found himself in the midst of countless 
difficulties. Beyond the fact of his own distrust of 
statements in the sphere of life, and the certainty of 
any spiritual utterance of his being misunderstood, — 
alike by perverted Jews and not yet sufficiently edu- 
cated disciples, — the force and fire of his own nature, 
the exigencies of those moods which were stirred in 



136 Ecce Spiritus. 

him by the low outlook of humanity in his day, de- 
manded an utterance at once brief, authoritative, and 
uncompromising; and, if his language seems sometimes 
sublimated and inadequate for common comprehen- 
sion, it is because of the palpable and utter failure of 
the many forms of temporizing common in his day. 
Of all prophets, moreover, Jesus is the most far- 
sighted, and least likely to have confined his view of 
his mission to the necessities of his own time. An 
ideal for humanity must be one to lead all human 
progress, to inspire its study and effort forever; so 
high that the history of the centuries will be that of 
an ever-nearer approach to its comprehension and re- 
alization. This is why the power of true Christianity 
is perennial. Nineteen centuries, with their accumu- 
lated culture and their intenser consciousness, have 
only brought men a little nearer to the heart of its 
sublime reality; and the widening science and deeper 
personality of the future will be the key to yet 
clearer understanding of those apparently mystical, 
but eminently simple, statements of life as it was in 
Jesus. For his own time, they were sufficient as they 
stood. Wonder and childlike awe at any form of 
actual superiority, however imperfectly understood, 
had not yet exhausted themselves. What the world 
was not then prepared to comprehend was, neverthe- 
less, able to be a vast power of subjugation over the 
lower in its nature; while the advancing life of all 
time would find in its higher and completer statement 
a perpetual goal of promise and attainment. Nothing 
phort of this would have answered the requirements 



The Selfhood of Jesus. 137 

of a mission such as that of Jesus, and surely nothing 
less could have furnished mankind with a truth which 
is ever an incentive rather than a sedative. It is not 
the truth simply and abstractly which Jesus has in 
view, so much as the truth embodied in life. The 
race is to work toward it, to make it its own, to iden- 
tify it with its entire growth. It is not for men as 
yet to say that they comprehend it ; they may now 
comprehend only its drift and purpose, its reality 
beyond everything else. It is not for us, even though 
with tears in our eyes, to complain that our consola- 
tions are not yet complete. They are enough, when 
rightly understood; and, for the rest, there is icork 
for us to do. We are not left to stagnate in our 
finalities, but are invited, nay, forced onward, to the 
blessed consummations of life. 

Jesus not only ignored the narrower sense of his 
personality when he appeared as an authority before 
others, but he desired them likewise to do so. He 
asks mankind to look upon a grandly poised selfhood, 
which found its supreme exercise in merging itself in 
the very highest. When he awoke to himself, and the 
awakening was very early, his whole nature became 
fused into the white heat of spiritual intensity. He 
saw the new, the needed, the vital work ; and all else 
slipped out of sight. Like every other great soul 
girded for a work of inspiration, — only supremely 
so in his case, as befitted the peculiar character and 
absoluteness of his calling, — he was himself not 
sunken in, but enlarged by, the thing to be done. 
It was identification and consequent increase of per- 



138 Ecce Spiritus. 

sonality, and no belittlement, that came to him in his 
higher assumptions. 

In order to understand the peculiar make-up of 
the man, we must keep in sight the character of his 
object, and its accompanying influence on his life. 
This was of no ordinary kind, and held with no 
common devotion. It was not a part, however in- 
spiring, of the kingdom of truth, but the very high- 
est and most inclusive of all its realities. It was God, 
and all possible communion with him, and man at his 
hitherto unknown possibility, including the entire 
range of the vast thing so often named but so seldom 
understood as life, that he had in hand. To have been 
burdened with the secret of some farthest star on the 
boundary of human knowledge would doubtless have 
been much ; but to have come from God, and the one 
closest insight and communion ever vouchsafed to man, 
and from the outermost limit of life's unseen possi- 
bility, was an endowment so much greater than the 
highest common to men as to have eliminated the 
element of egotism from its possession. "Before 
Abraham was, I am," he asserts. Does he mean the 
man of their daily intercourse and understanding, the 
Jesus on his commoner side ? IsTo : he is speaking out 
of a present, all-absorbing, soul-consciousness, of a life 
principle in direct and eternal communication with the 
Father, which antedated all the centuries. The peo- 
ple about him are localizing their faith, shut out from 
all advancement by their willingness to bound their 
own insight by one narrow and occasional experience. 
He is forced out of all commonplaces into a supreme 



The Selfhood of Jesus. 139 

and authoritative statement. He has not a word to 
say against Abraham; but, long before him and his 
incidental glimpse of God, spirituality, full-orbed and 
self-conscious, could assert itself to have existed. With 
that deep inlook which came to him in the fulness of 
his spiritual consciousness, he could well antedate all 
their petty limitations. There was and is nothing 
earlier than this. The secrets of creation as well as 
of destiny are in its hands. There is nothing to gain- 
say it. 

Jesus had now become wholly spiritual, and it was 
hence easy for him to assert his oneness with God. 
Out of his nearness to imperishable things, he could 
speak authoritatively of a life as unconscious of begin- 
ning as of end, earlier than the patriarchs in its divine 
origin and continuance, now brought to realization. 
The life of which he had become conscious waa the 
very life of God, once imparted and never by any 
possibility withdrawn, separate from which we have 
and can have no real existence. This he does not 
have, for he is it. Awaken men to it, and he claims 
for them a like newness of self-consciousness. They 
will not need to go backward nor forward, but will 
be superior to all considerations of time in the su- 
preme and present facts of existence. The moment 
of consciousness is of less account than the hind of 
consciousness. There is a sort that includes all. It 
is possible to be so filled with the essential principle 
of life as to pass beyond the sphere of incidental 
questions. If Jesus had reached this point, he had a 
right to his statement. 



140 Ecce Spiritas. 

Other men have had this, in faint approaches to 
the clear realization which came to the mind of Jesus. 
But, unlike them, he never doubted nor questioned 
nor speculated. It was consciousness that spoke in 
him, and made possible the clear, calm certainties of 
his life, the almost utter absence of the things that 
cloud and embitter our experience. He talked of 
God as if he had but just left him, as in truth he really 
had. It never occurred to him to prove his existence. 
That attempt was left for an age stranded on the 
shallow reaches of scientific certainty. He introduced 
no mathematics into the demonstration of facts that 
are so consciously real. If he had stooped to the 
poor expedient of external proof, the world might 
well have doubted his claim to anything but the 
knowledge of the empiricist. 

It is not by the processes of logic that men come to 
God. There are not enough formulas and symbols in 
the universe to prove him. It is He that hoi Is and 
comprehends creation, and not creation that holds 
and comprehends Him. We prove what is less than 
we arc, that which we can master. We are too small 
intellectually to demonstrate infinite being, but it is 
the very fact of God's existence that proves ours. The 
certainties of our life lie in him, and nowhere else. 
Without him, it will be a delusion and an unreality. 
If we insist upon proving God, we are lost ; while our 
salvation comes in allowing his existence to demon- 
strate and make reasonable our own. 

Jesus sees that God lives in the facts of conscious- 
ness, a demonstration far more certain than any that 



The Selfhood of Jesus. 141 

merely appeals to either the reason or the senses. 
Last of all would he doubt this^ knowing that an eye 
shall be color-blind or an ear deceptive as to sound, 
before the soul shall deny its own. He puts no im- 
putation on the senses, but holds them rigidly to the 
interpretation of matter. They are unquestioned 
authority in the sphere of tangible things, but they 
can go no further of themselves. With a soul back 
of them, they reveal a world of wonderful meaning 
and suggestiveness, types and symbols, representatives 
and correspondences everywhere of that which is 
essential and imperishable. Jesus has no quarrel with 
the fleshly witnesses, but would confine them to their 
sphere. Understood at their real worth, and related 
as they were intended to be to the higher spiritual 
faculties, of which they are but feeble representatives 
in the sphere of matter, they become at their highest 
development the source of mighty use and beauty. 
But, turning from the last and grandest utterance 
they can make, Jesus asks what the soul has to say. 
And, as he listens, the front he gives the world grows 
grandly calm. The poise of eternity is in that assur- 
ance of an undivided nature ; not the bravery of a 
petty trust, an emasculated courage, — such as we 
often see extolled in the name of religion, .although it 
is robbed of everything but weak and meaningless de- 
pendence, and unfounded on that knowledge, sympa- 
thy, and understanding of nature and the providence 
of God, which are, in at least some degree, demanded 
of us; but that of a soul marching through destiny 



142 Ecce Spiritus. 

with undisturbed tread, heaven in his outlook and the 
certainties in his steps. 

Nor do we forget the rare moments of a strictly 
human emotion, when, for a moment, his soul seemed 
to fall from its equipoise. But it was only for a mo- 
ment, — only enough to relieve us of the fear that, 
after all, this cannot be the life of one like us, that this 
can be no mere humanity, so firm and exalted, — but 
rather some strange divinity ; only enough to bring the 
lesson home to men who, like him, are called to suffer 
and to triumph in strictly human ways. And even in 
the garden, and on the lonely mountain-top, it is not 
dread, nor complaining, nor any form of recreancy, so 
much as the purely natural feeling of disappointment 
and sorrow for a world so tenderly loved, and so soon 
to be left in its degradation and need. It was apos- 
tasy and blindness in those who should have under- 
stood and sustained him in the trying hour, those 
arid wastes of unsympathetic questioning on every 
hand, that for the moment unmanned him. Add, if 
you will, an instant of purely human recoil from the 
prospect before him, — which nevertheless was not al- 
lowed the slightest weight in the strong determina- 
tions of his life, — and nothing has been allowed which 
in the least derogates from his most comprehensive 
claim. 

Jesus, then, is to be regarded as peculiar in method, 
as well as in the subject-matter of his mission. The 
message even transcends mere truth in its abstract 
relations, and becomes the highest and most effective 
of all agencies in its quality as an embodied, personal, 



The Selfhood of Jesus. 143 

practical verity. When it becomes operative, truth 
is supreme : as a living, breathing reality, it has dis- 
tanced the most complete assertion. The truth as it 
was in Jesus — and the truth had become himself — is 
loftier and more lasting than any message he merely 
announced. His own inward necessity, as well as the 
exigencies of his work, demanded that his truth 
should take form, but that form must be a living one. 
And the result was every way what it should be as 
left by his hand. Had he lingered too long, or allowed 
men to look too much at the truth as it was in him, 
rather than at that which was to be in themselves, a 
radical weakness would have appeared in his work. 
But, w^ith a foresight that has in it nothing sad, he 
assures them that it is expedient for them that he 
should go away. They have seen the truth embodied, 
but it is still the truth, and not the body, at which 
they must be forced to look. It is expedient for their 
highest, purest vision of reality that, beyond a certain 
point, the man should disappear. That which should 
be in themselves must not be worshipped in another. 
"For," he explains, "if I go not away, the Com- 
forter will not come unto you ; but, if I depart, I will 
send him unto you." And again, in the same connec- 
tion, " Howbeit, when he, the spirit of truth, is come, 
he will guide you into all truth, for he shall not 
speak of himself" etc. In other w^ords, this spirit of 
truth cannot come, so long as there is one clinging 
literalism in the worship of man. Even he must be 
careful not to stay too long. It is the spirit that is 
to be all in all. 



CHAPTER X. 

THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 

From one point of view there is no stronger posi- 
tion of so-called Orthodoxy than that which under- 
rates merely abstract statements of truth in the 
presence of a j> er sonal Saviour. The strength of 
evangelical Christianity among the masses has been 
far from proportionate to the insight and accuracy of 
its stand-point of faith mainly through this fact, that 
it has appealed with a peculiar power to the most 
strictly human side of men's minds, enforcing itself 
through living pictures of truth in the concrete. Men 
who could not judge between the fine points of doc- 
trine have been made to feel the man Jesus. Rhe- 
torical art finds no difficulty in giving that fine human 
touch which speedily puts into oblivion, or subtly har- 
monizes, the strange jugglery of theologic conceptions 
which precede it. The mystery is stated ; but the ele- 
ment of mystery is made to seem only apparent when, 
at the next moment, the man, with his wonderful and 
many-sided experience, is brought forth to embody 
and substantiate it. There is enough in such a life 
and character to float almost any doctrine which has 
serious intent ; and the mere fact of the close identifi- 
cation of dogmas of monstrous perversion with the 



The Personal Element. 145 

living personality of a man who suffered and loved 
and died as Jesus did, has accounted for the currency 
of a vast system of false teaching. 

Unquestionably there is power in the conception of 
a truth embodied, which must ever be denied to the 
most complete of abstract statements. The mind has a 
natural appetite and capacity for truth infusion, taken 
up and vitalized, and made effective through that 
readiest of all means of effectiveness, the personality. 
It is doubtful if indeed truth can ever be adequately 
stated in abstract terms. It has, to be sure, an intel- 
lectual formula; but that is not it, and can never be 
more than one way of showing it. We do not see 
the truth until we see it in action, working out itself 
with an utterance far more adequate than that of lan- 
guage. Truth itself is not abstract. It is the life, the 
constitution of God, and never, so far as we know, ex- 
pressed by him intellectually, but vitally. It was only 
for lack of the living form that man ever flew to the 
logic, When the groping consciousness could not find 
the too distant Father, the last resource was to im- 
prison him in thought. Unconsciously, we assume 
that the essence of truth is intellectual, and its appear- 
ance in living form is only one of its many applications. 
But there is no truth apart from the being of God. It 
exists in vital form, and our broadest intellectual state- 
ment of it is only in reality one of its applications. 
With no disposition to undervalue the sphere of 
thought, we may say that it is not the only, and cer- 
tainly not the nearest, method of approach to the high- 
est. It is certainly linked with all the best that men 



146 JEcce Spiritus. 

do and become, and it must be found in any full and 
adequate experience. We are so constituted that, to 
think aright, nay, to think at all positively and hon- 
estly, is to furnish the motive and the standard with- 
out which we can at the outset attain nothing. 

But there is thought and thought. We are in the 
habit of conceiving God as the archetypal Thinker, 
but see how closely his thought has been related to 
life. He did not merely think out the universe, but 
by that act created it. With him, the intellection of a 
thing is its projection into being. In no other way 
does he work save by reason of his prerogative of Cre- 
ative Thought. The progress of man has been in all 
ways tending toward this same result, as a possibility 
for himself, so that, whereas formerly the brute force 
of brawn and muscle was the most powerful factor in 
life, the advantage has now shifted to the higher plane 
of thought. This has now become the measure of our 
modern life. Men do not so much as formerly employ 
hands and feet to minister to their desires and attain 
their ends; but, by following out the most abstruse 
processes with an inventive genius that sometimes 
seems almost akin to the creative skill of God, they 
have evoked all the forces of earth and air to do their 
bidding. What they have accomplished by thought 
they have made to serve their thought. The laborious 
processes of navigation, of messenger, express, or 
even locomotive service have been largely superseded 
by cable, telegraph, and telephone, so that now hands 
and feet rest, while men merely think their thoughts 
and wishes, and they are heard and obeyed. We 



The Personal Element. 147 

have thus taken a long stride nearer that method of 
the Almighty which reduces matter to the simple ser- 
vice of mind. We think, with God himself, to thrill 
the most stupendous forces of nature to ready obedi- 
ence. We think alive : our thought has form, propul- 
sion, outcome. Our practical civilization has not been 
without its gain in higher power and suggestiveness. 
One mistakes who merely sees an age bent solely on 
material prosperity and devotion to physical science. 
It is the grandest age in history, when thought, eman- 
cipated from the metaphysics of a preceding era, 
has marched out into the universe, and reduced mere 
things to expressions of man's thinking power. We, 
in our sphere, think the universe into action daily. 
We have learned that there is something stronger 
even than the limbs of Hercules. We have found 
that the metaphysician who masters time and space, 
and light and warmth, by thinking himself into wood 
and iron and electricity, is vastly nearer the creative 
intelligence than the one who merely plays with the 
abstract symbols of reality. The world, so long in the 
hands of the power-men, now answers to the mind. 
But it is not merely the thinker, but a new race of 
thinkers, who rule the world. The first step is seen 
when the rude, rugged energies of men, unconscious of 
any but material wants, and content to satisfy them 
by the sweat of the brow, give place to the fine flash- 
ings of intelligence, which in our day dignify even 
the crudest labors into something of scientific ease. 
The crowning step will come later, when the tendency 
has had full development, and reached even to the 



148 JEcce Spiritus. 

highest. Then men will think God-thoughts, thoughts 
that move irresistibly to action, and complete them- 
selves in life. 

Mark, then, that the drift is away from a simple in- 
tellection oi God, to some living realization of him, — 
some perfect idea projected into personality. Para- 
doxical as it may seem in speaking of a Spiritual 
Being, God is not a mere abstraction, and can be 
neither portrayed nor impressed abstractly. Jesus 
had thoughts of God most high and complete ; but the 
strength of his influence lay in the fact that those ideas 
had taken possession of him until they issued forth, a 
new personality. They had become living, formative, 
effective in him. They were himself; and, by all the 
personal power possible to him or any man, they ut- 
tered and impressed themselves. When they became 
a man, there was immediate hope of their effective- 
ness. They were as true intellectually before, but 
now for the first time they were plain and potent. 

We have much to say about the triumph of truth, 
but there is no such triumph outside of men. The 
hope of such an issue will rest upon the likelihood of 
truth finding embodiment and coming to conquest 
through the only really impressive means of influence, 
the human personality. There is no power outside of 
this. Truth is truth ; but men never see its full rela- 
tions, nor feel its greatest effectiveness, except by 
means of men. There is but the shadow of power in 
a mere idea which gains mental allegiance without 
reaching the motives ; but the ideas that have been em- 
bodied and pushed by men have swayed not only the 



The Personal Element. 149 

thinking, but the life of the race. Bunsen says that 
personality is the lever of the world's history; a truth 
which is only restated by Renan in that justification he 
makes for the biographical form he has given to what 
he originally intended as a history of Christian doc- 
trines, — his Life of Jesus, — when he says: "But I 
have since learned that history is not a mere play of 
abstractions, that in it men are more than doctrines. 
It is not a certain theory in regard to justification and 
redemption which produced the Reformation : it was 
Luther, it was Calvin. Parseeism, Hellenism, Juda- 
ism, might have combined in all forms. The doctrines 
of the resurrection of the Word might have been de- 
veloped for centuries without producing this fecund, 
unique, sublime fact, which is called Christianity. 
This fact is the work of Jesus, of Saint Paul, of Saint 
John." 

Jesus gave more than the rationale of the great 
human possibility: he brought to light the living 
potency of a personal absorption. His truth acts 
directly. We get near to the man, not as an indi- 
vidual, not merely as a man, but as an embodiment of 
something higher, to feel the full effect of his message. 
Indeed, herein lie both the deathless power and the 
danger of his peculiar method. If we stop with the 
man, as we shall frequently be tempted to do, we 
shall lose the very result he had at heart. Not for a 
moment would Jesus have men regard him : he is 
only too eager to reject even the ascription of good- 
ness, so modest and filial is his spirit. Nevertheless, 
the fact of his spiritual personality, vivid and strong 



150 Ecce Spiritus. 

and uncompromising, can never be left out of the 
account in any adequate estimate of his mission. Or- 
thodoxy split upon this too easy rock, and, disregard- 
ing the express wishes of Jesus, as well as utterly 
overlooking his principle, according to which every 
inference from his words is to be squared, rested its 
worship in the individual. It is a far different thing 
to come under the influence of his personality, to 
see the truth, the principle, in him, and not him in 
the truth. He is never the objective point, — that is 
found in spirituality. It must be shown and im- 
pressed in human ways; but the man is only the 
vehicle, the principle is all in all. The means are 
infinitely dignified with the message, but it is the 
message at which we look. This personal aspect of 
the man does not refer to the accidental or transi- 
tory in his experience, but rather to the essential. It 
is utterly himself, but in a sense the perception of 
which can never harm another. It is far removed 
from egotism in the subject, and from narrow worship 
of the object of its influence. The human instrument 
must be neither overlooked nor confounded with the 
message it impresses. The truths of being reside in 
him, and through him we see them; but they still 
remain truths of being, and not of this man or that. 
It is so God presents himself to the minds of 
men. There is a vast deal of futile reasoning as 
to the personality of God, simply because personality 
is misunderstood. It is a question that lies at the 
heart of the deepest need of the day. The vague 
deistic position, which is almost universally conceded, 



The Personal Element. 151 

has taken the place of the idolatrous dogmatism of 
the ages of faith, largely because of the common con- 
fusion as to personality and individuality. Men at 
their accidental plane are both personal and indi- 
vidual: it is only at the fuller point of conscious 
development to which the race is ever more nearly 
approaching that all other distinctions are swallowed 
up in that of ripe and rounded personality. God is 
not an individual in the sense that we are, but the 
divine Personality is the very essence of himself. 
With no disposition to dogmatize in so metaphysical 
a matter, we may yet say that the question of God's 
personality seems to be one which should never for a 
moment be entertained. If God is the parent, arche- 
typal Life, — and he can be nothing else, — we have but 
to acknowledge that the only form under which we 
know or can conceive of life existing is the personal 
one, to sufficiently answer the question. It is not 
possible for the mind of man, out of its widest ex- 
perience, to evolve any other conception of life than 
this. We are asked, and we are allowed, to go no 
further than this. The ever-living God may have 
some form of life utterly different from anything we 
can ever know ; but, if we came from and are to go 
to him, if there is honesty in the equipment of con- 
sciousness, experience, and even intellectual data, 
received as a possibility from Him, his life can be 
none other than a personal one. He cannot be, he 
cannot live, — and surely he is the God of the living, 
— under any other conception of deity. 

The clear spiritual vision of Jesus revolted at the 



152 Ecce Spiritus. 

cold Hebraic abstraction, — the Jehovah removed so 
far from the possibility of human apprehension and 
approach. It was the strength and fineness of his own 
personality that led him so familiarly to the Person 
of the Father. It was the prime factor in himself, 
which at once separated him from the people, and 
drew them, awe-stricken, to his feet. In his hands, it 
was a power to work a like result in others, bringing 
them not to him, but to themselves. It was himself ; 
but it worked to create, not to copy. It was his best 
and grandest, that which alone gets hold of and moves 
us; but it is because he had come to his higher self in 
the truth, because he had become the truth, that we are 
affected. It is the truth as it was in Jesus, not Jesus, 
that we worship and especially emphasize. 

There is a personality that we wish to gain, and 
one we are very willing to lose. We say that a truth 
divorced from the living capacity of the giver not 
only becomes inoperative, but so far forth tends to 
weaken the wholeness of influence which is born out 
of character. On the other hand, the weak imitation 
and want of genuine and strong personality in the 
holding of truth, the too common aptitude for reflect- 
ing it on the surface from others, is one of the great 
dangers to be met by him who exerts influence, even 
though it be of the highest. Men need an inward 
spur, an incentive toward self-creation, and a higher 
personality, but least of all to lose themselves in 
another. 

The worship of Jesus, then, drops out of any con- 
ception of Christianity which is referred to the primi- 



The Personal Element. 153 

tive spirit and teaching of its Founder. Christianity 
is a worship and service and personal embodiment of 
God's truth, impressed upon humanity through the 
highest form of human creation and development 
known to the race. Jesus is more than a mere exem- 
plar, and both more and less than a savior, in that 
he makes us possible saviors of ourselves. He in- 
spires a rightful love and reverence toward himself, 
but is wronged and shamed by the narrow partisan- 
ship that will see and worship him, and only him. 
There is something almost cruel to the memory of so 
modest, so manly a man, in this perpetual clinging 
to his cross. The religious leech, that passively ab- 
sorbs another's salvation, can have no part in that 
triumph which Jesus wrought out in his own soul 
between himself and God. The way thereof he has 
made plain, but the cross and the triumph must be 
our own. 



CHAPTER XI. 

LIFE. 

It has been already stated that Christianity has to 
do peculiarly with life. In fact, it not only furnishes 
an impetus in this direction, but also an entire view 
of life different from that in acceptance at the time 
of its promulgation, as well as strange to our own 
common conception. It first went to the roots of liv- 
ing, and based its ideal of life on the widest possible 
understanding of its facts, its tendencies, and its pos- 
sibilities. It said that to know how to live, and to 
carry knowledge into execution, was to be as near 
God and the idea he had in creation as possible. 
That was religion and a great deal more besides, not 
commonly included in that specialized word. 

It is singular that the last thing of which man 
comes to full consciousness is life. His advance in 
boasted knowledge has been along the line of separate 
facts. There is a science of everything but life. 
There is a professorship of every least and most 
trivial branch of its vast reality, but no one who at- 
tempts to teach it as a whole. Meanwhile, is it any 
wonder that the world is full of dissatisfaction and 
despair ? We are taught to analyze in the sphere of 
matter, to reconstruct the mathematical problems, to 



Life. 155 

understand the various forms of speech, to exercise 
abstractly the faculty of thought, and to generalize in 
the realm of history. Then, for the rest, after men 
and women are sent out into the world, they speedily 
become distraught with a thousand special and press- 
ing issues with which they find themselves utterly 
unable to deal. All the perplexing questions which 
agitate society and the individual are summed up 
and answered in the single, and in one sense simple, 
science of life. Our frequent and anxious agitation 
of reform is simply an unconscious acknowledgment 
that men have not been formed, have not been trained 
and educated in that most important of all sciences, 
how to live, and must needs by constant and laborious 
process be brought back and reformed. So long as 
we are educated in everything else but life, in all 
of its separate branches and superficial accomplish- 
ments, instead of striking at the heart of this great 
reality that is missed or violated on every hand, and 
as the very highest test of our culture, — so long our 
best effort will be but a track forever travelled back- 
ward. 

And the evil lies very deep. In the first place, life 
is that of which we are least conscious. It is a law 
of our being that we are most readily conversant with 
things on the surface. It is the deepest and most 
central that we commonly ignore or undervalue. Life 
is so familiar a fact, so co-extensive with our earliest 
knowledge and experience, that it is in general the 
matter about which we think last and least. It is 
the accepted fact, the common, little-to-be-noted oc- 



156 JEcce Spiritus. 

currence, while the countless methods of making it 
spirited or amusing constitute the chief objects of our 
attention. Almost no one starts out to live, to study 
the facts, the laws, the possibilities of life, and by 
rigid adherence to these to be a master in the sphere 
of being. Each chooses to excel in some particular 
branch for its own sake, and not for its possible re- 
lations to life as a whole, as a vantage-point from 
which to conquer the whole field. Even the clergy- 
man, set apart to the highest, wants to convert souls 
technically or to build up a particular church, while 
the infinitely wider realm of life is left comparatively 
untouched. Religion as a separate function is vastly 
inferior to life. There can be no full true life that 
is not religious ; but there has been a great deal of 
religion that was so technical and narrow as to be 
lifeless, while even the purest spirituality, the minute 
it becomes exclusive, defeats its own ends and becomes 
inoperative. 

So widely has this attitude prevailed, of indifference 
to, or even weariness of, a life that was irksome be- 
cause not studied nor understood, that in some degree 
religion has sprung up in the heart of man as a relief 
from or added conrpletion to it. In its common forms, 
religion has ever underrated life, teaching its worth- 
lessness, and pointing man on through sacrifice and self- 
extermination to something beyond, which, however 
comforting and inspiring to a morbid religious faith, 
is certainly very different from anything we know as 
life. The vague and pietistic dreamings of church- 
men, shut off from the joy of keen and many-sided 



Life. 157 

activities, and almost wholly given to abstract stud- 
ies, bear no relation to the rugged energies whereby 
healthy nature has ever found its only taste of life. 
All these must be tamed and attenuated, until out of 
the weakened body and abnormally stimulated imagi- 
nation should burst some glowing apocalyptic vision 
of the world to be. The radical error in the position 
of the pietist lay in the fact of the too easy relin- 
quishment of life as a problem. Its weakness and 
un worthiness were readily seen; and then, instead of 
addressing itself to the study and normal solution of 
its mystery and want, the Church turned its back 
upon it as something inherently evil, and betook itself 
to the makeshift expedient of something entirely 
without precedent and theoretically perfect. It of- 
fered, in place of a limited and painful experience 
here, an existence which, if had at all, must be had 
with fixed and rigid necessity, — an arbitrary election, 
which doomed the saved recipient more than did his 
supposed loss of life the unredeemed sinner. His 
was a genuine and so far forth satisfactory extinction, 
while the elected saint was practically lost in the 
arbitrary conditions of his sainthood. Henceforth, he 
did not so much live as revolve around the infinite 
and incomprehensible Life. The ache and incom- 
pleteness of existence were not looked at in their 
larger relations to the purposes of God bound up in 
the very being of man. They were evils born of the 
evil in humanity, demanding not elucidation and a 
higher vision to interpret their place and meaning, 
but simply an antidote. Religion came, in their con- 



158 JEcce Spiritus. 

ception, because life was a failure, hence the relief and 
remedy must be radical and distinctive. This world 
was wrong, hence the objective point of their teach- 
ing was heaven. Since man was proved to be impo- 
tent, a martyr was better. Crucifixion, self-denial, 
practical extinction, became the very price of the 
larger and more enduring inheritance. 

The truer view of religion, the only one that can 
stand the tests of deepening culture and experience, 
regards it not as the relief from life, but as its crown 
and completion. It recognizes life first of all, not 
here nor there, caring little about the question of 
worlds, and being so full and conscious of this won- 
derful possibility in the very heart of being itself. It 
comes not to take away, but to hallow man's grief ; 
not to destroy, but to deify the world. It is a part of 
human joy, felt in every thrill of ecstasy and every 
pulse of power. It is no remedy, no negative and 
complement al element in the make-up of man, but 
a fact, a reality, of which all the separate spheres of 
existence are mere accidents; in short, in the com- 
pleter sense, life itself. 

The history of the growth of religious thought has 
clearly demonstrated this as a tendency more strongly 
emphasized at each successive stage of human devel- 
opment. Thus, it has hapj)ened that life, though com- 
monly ignored as a conscious issue, has been unwilling 
to be left out of sight in any adequate scheme of sal- 
vation. In spite of the still too great want of consid- 
eration for being as the central field of study and 
effort, the race has nowhere so rapidly advanced as 



Life. 159 

along the line of self-consciousness. Life is not recog- 
nized in its entirety, its specific relations, as it will be 
later on. Nevertheless, everything that goes to make 
it in its separate fields and functions is scanned with 
almost preternatural intentness. A deep-seated curi- 
osity watches every j)hase of matter, every movement 
of the mind. As we know and feel life now, it was 
never known before. Alongside of the waste and 
fever of practical activity has come the culmination 
of the two great intellectual tendencies, the meta- 
physic and the scientific. Introspective and analytic, 
with eyes turned inward as well as outward, to watch 
with tireless vigilance the processes of bodily, intellect- 
ual, and spiritual being, the man of to-day is no more 
like the primal man, the metaphoric dweller in the gar- 
den, than the child is like the patriarch or the savage 
like the savant. For the first time, the race wakes 
up to the primary inspirations of life. Full conscious- 
ness has not yet come ; but out of the intense individ- 
uality, never so deep and vital as now, and the subtle 
realization of everything that goes on within and 
makes for the existence of man, which characterizes 
our age, we may look for the time when life as a rec- 
ognized study will outrank all the sciences in the esti- 
mation of mankind. 

Then, when life as such is understood, there will not 
be so much talk about the religions. It will be seen 
that there is, and can be, only one sufficient life, and 
that religious ; as also only one religion, and that the 
religion of life. Even now, we are coming to see that 
whatever finds credence and enduring power with the 



160 Ecce Spiritus. 

mass of men must appeal to this awakening self-con- 
sciousness, must be in the line of this practical ten- 
dency which studies the facts without and within, 
must be in harmony with and not antagonistic to the 
pride and the joy and the blessedness of life. The 
age will have nothing to do with churchly slurs on the 
vast and hopeful activities which animate its effort : it 
will take no part in pietistic cant about the worthless- 
ness of life, and the glory of fagots and consecrated 
resting-places. The time has this answer to all false 
underrating of the active self-consciousness of the day, 
that the evil of mankind, as well as of the Church, has 
been in its ignorance and rejection of life ; that, while 
studying everything else, it has been content to evade 
the actual conditions out of which come health and 
happiness. It has filled the world with the cries of its 
agony and want of harmony, demanding the pity of 
men everywhere, through history, poetry, art, and re- 
ligion; while it has all the time refused to live, declined 
to look on life as a problem, preferring rather to con- 
sider it as a debtor, upon which it has an especial and 
constant claim. The vital relations of man in the 
threefold sphere of his being, to God, to man, and to 
himself, are left to the study of the specialist, sepa- 
rated as far as possible by the very exigencies of his 
position from the facts, and doomed to the abstract 
methods and narrow i^remises of his fatal inheritance. 
While the government has its accredited and utterly 
untrammelled students of the rocks and stars, life, 
not sectarian, not religious, in the narrower sense of 
the term, upon which, more than anything else, its 



Life. 161 

very institutions rest, is left to the fate of chance. It 
is not until very recently that the Church has said 
anything about the necessity for life. Every move- 
ment of Protestantism has been born primarily of this 
fact, the new Church becoming powerless as soon as 
the fire of the momentary protest had faded, and life 
had been forgotten in the fresh but equally lifeless 
formalism. Men are just beginning to understand 
themselves, the world in which they live, and that 
mutual relationship, that interblending of ties and de- 
pendences between it and them and God, which fur- 
nishes the true conditions of life. Now there bids 
fair in time to be a science deeper than all the sciences, 
one that shall do more than merely teach us how to 
subjugate the earth or to read the stars, important and 
inspiring as these undoubtedly are, in teaching us to 
live. Religion will not suffer, except superficially and 
healthfully. It will lose much, as is well, and entirely 
shift its stand-point ; but it will gain much in getting 
closer to the centre and all the realities of life. This 
science of life, made up of all, yet deeper, truer, more 
pervasive than all, will be the religion of the future ; 
and there will be nothing in heaven or on earth, no 
power, material or spiritual, which will not come into 
its hands. Its demand will be everywhere for more 
life, not less. It will take no especial account of this 
world or the next, but will first insist upon the dignity 
of man as man, as originating in and ever more and 
more consciously related to God, and then solemnly 
call upon him to live. 

By the frequent use of the word "life," it must not 



162 JSJcce /SpiHtus. 

be supposed that anything is intended in contrast with 
the very highest conception man has ever had of a 
possible existence. The object is not to put the lower 
in place of the higher, but to show the unity of the 
one and only life in all its varied spheres, and to in- 
dicate that, so comprehensive and vital is its scope and 
meaning, we need, least of all, to supplement its sub- 
lime reality with any theological substitute. It is no 
undue preeminence conceded to physiology over biol- 
ogy, or biology over spirituality, but the insistence on 
the fact already too long deferred, — that life is one, 
nay, infinite, and large enough to account for everything 
in the sphere of its manifestation, as well as to meet 
every demand in the present and future of mankind. 
It is to suggest the grandest thought and the most 
significant theme of human intelligence which has for 
so long, in its larger relations and its scientific aspects, 
been kept in the background. 

Life is all that there is. When everything has been 
sifted, it alone remains, the one thing that never 
lessens. It is the fixed quantity of experience, that 
which, amid frequent shiftings and dismemberments, 
not only animates time and space, but lays hold of 
eternity. These four letters spell out the grandest, 
most inclusive and inspiring word in the language. 
Life combines all things in itself, is all the j)arts of it 
you can name, — all science and spirituality, all history 
and philosophy, all art and nature, jill possible thrills 
and ecstasies, all griefs and glories; yea, and some- 
thing more and greater besides, made up of the aggre- 
gate of all experience and yet through all and above all 



Life. 163 

an entity. The activities, interests, and ideals of one 
generation, give way to those of another. The lights 
and prophets rind benefactors are for a day, but life is 
ever one. It reaches back and gathers up in tireless 
transmission the roots and tendencies of every throb 
and motion of being, and knows that it is deathlessly 
related to every breath of most remote existence, a 
part of all coming bane and blessing. No part of it 
is ever lost or unrelated to the whole. Everything 
ministers to life. Everything witnesses it. For it the 
earth was created, and at its fulness it is something 
the heaven of heavens cannot contain. It makes 
everything tributary, but is itself never subject. It 
demands and holds itself worth infinite sacrifice of 
momentary ease and enjoyment. To have lived — 
nay, to live — is much, everything. Through mani- 
fold apparent loss and misery, the great fact stands 
out in all its majestic import, that existence is grand. 
To have suffered means both less and more to him 
who appreciates the prerogative of being, than it 
does to one who lives upon the surface. He knows 
that nothing can be lost to life, that out of its 
wholeness all partialness is made good. He knows 
that God lives, is God simply by reason of his in- 
finitude of life ; that He is not merely the originator 
and destiny of being, but the absolute and perfect 
realization of it. God is, and that fact transcends all 
possible distinctions of love, power, justice, truth. 
The " I Am " of Jehovah outweighs the most minute 
and accurate category of divine attributes and 
qualities. When a human being has reached the " I 



164 JEcce Spirit its. 

am " point, his education and salvation have com- 
menced. Then force, beauty, grandeur, begin as 
conscious possessions. Then there will no longer be 
estrangement from the Great, the Parent ; * I Am," — 
nor incompleteness nor aberration in the rounded 
orbit of perfected action and exercise. It is simply be- 
cause men do not know, or have forgotten themselves, 
that they pursue so exclusively the many poor and 
trivial ends. The objective point of all moral and re- 
ligious enlightenment is the re-creation of the positive 
consciousness of being. To have awakened men to 
the fact that they are really alive, not superficially nor 
accidentally nor temporarily, but actually and inher- 
ently alive^ is to have begun the one process of re- 
demption which needs no other to complete its work. 

TTe have said that God is Life; yet men have 
sought him in everything else, and with every other 
kind of searching save that of developed being in 
themselves. TVho by searching can find God? Surely, 
if he is far off, we cannot hope to reach him. Either 
He is near, a p ssible realization from within, or it is 
a lost cause with humanity. It is life alone that finds 
Life ; and only in proportion as we live, roundly and 
fully, do we come to a consciousness of God. 

The fact of divine creation suggests this wonderful 
quality of life as it is in Him. Although He constantly 
imparts, He remains the infinite fulness. Life is the 
only thing that can be given without loss. To impart 
is its exercise, its completion, the test of its vitality. 
Death withholds everything, life nothing. Its per- 
fection comes alono* the line of its g;enerositv. Its 



Life. 165 

seeming negation is the very condition of its positive- 
ness. Consequently, when man sprung into being, 
although his sphere was circumscribed, — the principle 
being the pure parental one, — he was amenable to 
the same law. Not only must he be creative and 
unselfish, but he must come vitally into relations with 
God. The responsive complements the creative in 
divine nature, and man finds the actual and constant 
necessity of spiritual contact with his Source. 

It was this that Jesus saw so clearly amid the 
short-sightedness of his time. He found God an 
abstraction, and he left him a Father. He went 
further than the Jewish mind, which saw little beyond 
the fact that God had made the universe; he said that 
God not only thought out the universe and set it in 
motion, but evermore lives in it, in the beautiful order 
and fixity of divinely established law. But the most 
vigorous blow he struck was against the Jewish con- 
ception of law itself. This, in the hands of God, was 
large and living, ever spiritual although material in 
its occasional sphere of manifestation, and inclusive 
of the most intimate and loving relations between off- 
spring and Creator in the boundlessness of its working. 
He declared that the material evidences of a living 
God were insignificant compared with those from 
within, that the soul of man is the direct mirror of 
the Creator. There, in its irresistible instincts and 
tendencies, its intense and unquenchable longings, its 
energy that, though often dormant or perverted, is yet 
never lost, is it seen how truly in the sj)here of his 
creation God is alive. 



166 Ecce Spiritus. 

The Jewish theism began in Abraham, in the fresh, 
free, mountain glimpse he caught of the all-pervading 
Spirit principle. Moses saw the fading glow, but lost 
it in the attempt to imprison it in stone. Then, as 
the clouds of literalism gradually cleared, the arch 
of the rainbow of spiritual promise rested its span 
from Abraham to Jesus, with Moses lost in literalism 
between. The relief of occasional prophetic protests 
was but momentary, until Jesus came, charged with 
more than a mere protest, to declare that God is 
alive ; that life is the one perennially important and 
unchangeable thing to man ; that in the active, con- 
scious union of the two is all that humanity ever re- 
quires. His very personality was keyed to this great 
certainty. For it, he was prepared to live and die. 
God being Life, he asserted that it is life alone that 
can know him. And this he knew by reason of the 
presence of this same thing in himself. Out of his 
own experience, his struggle and suffering, his con- 
scious strength born out of determined and uncom- 
promising adherence to the highest, lie knew that it is 
simply the lack of this in others that makes God seem 
to them so vague, abstract, and distant. 

To find people who really live is so rare that we 
are profoundly impressed when one comes to our 
knowledge. We are awed, and stricken with the 
desire to canonize. It was this that gave Jesus so 
ready a sway and influence. Nor was it strange that 
an element of worship, as if sometimes he were a 
God, entered into the reverence for the man. It is 
ever so. Men refuse to live that for themselves which 



Life. 167 

they adore in others. Unquestionably, Jesus was 
phenomenally endowed, the product of race influences 
that culminated in him, but not so much so that he 
did not call all men to the same full exercise of 
the functions and possibilities of being by which he 
gained his own supreme exaltation. He was able to 
proclaim the living Fatherhood by reason of the liv- 
ing sonship in himself, which it was his object to de- 
velop out of the universal human possibility. This 
is the very heart of his message. Beyond his declara- 
tion that he is the Life, thus ignoring every other 
quality in himself as subordinate to this of being, he 
declares that he is come that men might have life, and 
have it more abundantly. He reiterates this again 
and again, under varying forms of statement, until 
this becomes the chief point of difference between him 
and the other founders of religious systems. He is 
never on the surface, but always at the heart and 
centre. His word is vital and vigorous, such as men 
full-orbed and manly can understand. It appeals to 
those who are alive and in earnest, while it is a re- 
proach, a rebuke, to the morbid and slothful. It has 
a thrill, and jmlses through us. It does not play and 
coruscate upon the merely intellectual or imaginative 
side, but gets into the hands and feet, and makes us 
over daily. Its range is limitless and its sweep 
mighty. It leaves out nothing, and can look down 
as well as up. There is only one Life, and the lower 
must be made the higher. 

The Church has tended to exalt religion, technically 
considered, over everything else; while its instra- 



168 Ecce Spiritus. 

ments of books or creeds or formulas have too often 
overshadowed the near and conscious functions of 
man's nature. But Jesus says Life, — whereof religion, 
as we commonly use that term, is only one side. Life, 
rightly looked upon, is religion, since it is that which 
brings us back to the Parent Life ; but religionism is 
only one of its countless expressions. It is ever seven 
times one, instead of one in seven. Religion is the 
highest side, but surely no one would think of claim- 
ing that it is all of life. Using the word in its eccle- 
siastical relations, religion is a part. The pure 
rationalistic order that succeeds it is another. But 
life is the whole, and will yet show how all things 
work together for good to them who live up to its full 
privilege. It culminates in its filial expressions of 
joyous and dutiful union with God. It exists in 
makeshift incompleteness in countless forms of igno- 
rance and perversion, but is only found real and 
representative at its fullest and highest. 

We question how many shall know it hereafter, 
when the fact remains that so few have known it 
here, that the heaven beyond is hardly more vague 
and incomprehensible than the heaven at hand. How 
vast, how sweeping, then, the revolution of Jesus ! 
How radical the revelation which cleared up and in- 
spired man's present as well as future existence with 
the light not of promise nor of hope, not of contingent 
life, but with the conscious certainty of a large and 
living reality. He brought no new and different kind 
of being, which man was incapable of comprehending, 
no mythic immortality, when earth and its opportu- 



Life. 169 

nities had failed to satisfy, but only something more 
and finer of the same sort, of which in their better 
moments they had had faint experience. Indeed, he 
brought nothing. He was an essential evolutionist, 
touching the inner springs in all men, and calling out 
the latent strength and beauty of insight to supreme 
exercise. He showed them simply how blind they 
were. He had much to say about the possession of 
eyes which could not see ; and his ultimate demand, 
ever held in reserve, was, He that hath faculties to use 
let him use them. He gave them a taste of harmony. 
The silent harp in life, once swept with a master hand, 
would tune experience to a loftier strain through- 
out the centuries. He brought his life close to theirs, 
so that even in their spiritual apprenticeship they were 
wonderfully touched and moved. 

To see how truly Jesus is the apostle of life, com- 
pare his method and its conclusions with those of 
Buddha. Both were early impressed with the hol- 
lowness and inadequacy of much that is dignified 
with the name of existence, and both were infinitely 
saddened at what they saw. Both were brought 
close to experience, although approaching it from 
external stand-points that were widely apart, — the 
one rich and royal, and the other poor and without 
place in the social scale; but the attention of each 
was chiefly caught by the surface-living of men. 
The worship of sense, with its attendants of sin, 
of loathsome disease and premature death, was, it is 
true, abhorrent to them ; but they saw alike that this 
was not the root of the difficulty. Each felt that 



170 JEcce Spiritus. 

this was the negative result of a positive something 
wanting in the common make-up, which, above all 
else, they must labor to supply. 

But the coincidence stops with the perception of 
the difficulty, since the methods and results of each 
were as widely separated as the poles. Buddha, 
seeing how unsatisfactory, nay, how wrong, life is, 
abandoned it altogether, as something beyond the 
hope of amelioration, and, going into the desert, 
announced, as the crowning revelation of his years of 
study suffering and self-abnegation, that the only 
relief, the only good, lay in non-being. Whatever 
nice question may lie between the scholars as to 
the full and precise meaning of Nirvana, it is certain 
that Buddha came to the calm, unshaken conclusion 
that life is an evil, and that the only salvation from it 
is to get as close as possible to unconsciousness. He 
proceeded at once to reduce the sum of evil as a 
negative quality by diminishing the positive quantity 
itself. The curse to his mind was not in perversion, 
but in creation itself. Hence his cry was for non- 
being, for less life instead of for more. 

With equal study, suffering, and self-abnegation, 
Jesus worked out the same problem in his own way. 
Keeping clear of the desert, and with only occasional 
excursions into places of solitary communing, in most 
of which he was attended by a saving few, in order 
that he might never lose sight of humanity, Jesus 
held himself close to life. If existence were wrong, 
it was in the midst of it, among its facts, its possi- 
bilities, its unseen or uncomprehended verities, that 



Life. 171 

lie must move to find the solution. The salvation 
of life, he saw, lies in nothing apart from life. 
" Subsists no law of life outside of life." The desert 
has no gospel for the crowded thoroughfare. The 
cell has no answer for the tears and prayers of the 
home. Jesus lived, drove the wandering thing called 
life back to its last, secret hiding-place ; and there, 
with his foot on the folly, the error, the caprice, he 
lifted up his voice above the cries of earth, and pro- 
claimed the sovereign remedy. It was more life, not 
less ; true life, not false ; the ascending, not the de- 
scending scale of being. He pointed men not down 
to non-existence, but up to life's Infinitude. His was 
no meagre God, but the Father of fulness. His was 
no negative escape, but a more positive approach. 
He would fill out, not narrow down. It was not 
the easy giving up, the coward's cold shoulder, but 
the grander taking hold. It was what the world had 
been waiting for, and what its richest experience has 
not yet out-grown. 

To see how true is this distinction in the case of 
Jesus, watch him in the records of his daily work. 
He is a living rebuke to the narrowness of those who 
have here and there earned the name of benefactor 
by a conception of duty which has limited rather 
than enlarged the outlook of man. He challenges the 
ecclesiastic as well as the partial scientist with an ex- 
perience as fresh, free, natural, and many-sided as that 
of the highest. Was religion beautiful? Yes, engag- 
ingly, absorbingly so. It employed all the faculties 
and resources ol his nature in. joyous exercise. It 



172 Ecce Spiritus. 

measured him and everything else in the capacious 
possibility it assumed to his mind. As a thoroughly 
spiritual man, he was in love with God's world, the 
nearer world of men, all social and aesthetic circles of 
enjoyment. 

He love 1 the waving fields of corn, even though it 
be on the Sabbath of a Jewish formalism, the woody 
shores of Gennesaret, and the flowering banks of the 
Jordan. He sat by the seashore; and, when the me- 
tropolis choked his nature-loving heart with the dust 
and disturbance of its streets, he fled to Olivet, with- 
out the city, for the communion of the fields and sym- 
pathetic friends. How near his heart to nature! 
Like every poet soul, he carried his thirst and repres- 
sion to the still, solemn rustling of solitary trees. In 
the universal Gethsemane, he found himself and his 
God, not as temple worshipjDer, as fingerer of the sa- 
cred books, but warm with the currents of that nature 
love that lies so near the sympathies of our race. 

Had he not been more and greater, he would have 
stopped to be a poet. A little more of the Greek in 
him, and he had been a dreamer in that most glorious 
system of aesthetics the world has ever seen. But 
thank God for the Greek in him. Fused as it was 
into the higher make-up, he was, through it, only the 
more cosmopolitan in his genius and influence, only 
the truer man, and nearer to the great human heart. 
He could not pass a wayside well, where in the sun- 
shine stood a woman with the sign of earth's work 
and weariness in her hands, and the deeper, more illu- 
sive look of earth's sin and sorrow in her sad eyes, 



Life. 173 

without making an excuse to talk. Did we think of 
him as absorbed in his truth, in this abstraction of a 
mission to men, absent-minded and self-centred on 
the mighty conceptions that filled his mind? Per- 
haps we could have forgiven him if he were, as the 
grateful world has forgiven many another narrow 
savior. But no, he is thrilled and filled with life, 
only keenly sympathetic with the actual needy real- 
ity, wherever it is found. The world's problem 
can be dropped : rather, here is the problem. The 
metaphysics paled before a simple Samaritan maiden 
with one gleam of the world's sorrow in her eyes. 
We learn of him at the wedding, funeral, and social 
visit, and infer that these most frequent occurrences 
are commonly omitted from the narrative because of 
their frequency. As truly a socialist as a poet, a 
lover of the world as well as keenly keyed to the 
pleasures of solitude, he is everywhere at home, 
always himself. He never in all this for a moment 
forgets that great call to his Father's business; and 
yet so unassumingly and so unconsciously does he 
work that they never seem to have suspected him 
of half his happy seriousness. 

But the strength and beauty of this lay in the fact 
that he found it all so sinrply and naturally in God. 
The range of his sympathies was no wider than it was 
high. It is in the light of this truth that his character 
comes out fullest and clearest. He does not abandon 
his fresh, free naturalness, and assume the long face of 
Pharisaic formality when he enters the Sacred Pres- 
ence. Putting off nothing and taking on nothing, he 



174 Ecce Spiritus. 

forgets to be anything but himself. There he does 
not live, and pray here. There he is not Jesus, and 
here the posing Christ. There he is not sportive, 
and here so covered up and abnormally straightened 
that even God cannot recognize him. Here as there, 
he is alive and at home. You see life only, but it is 
its crowning expression, its moment of supreme ex- 
perience and exalted consciousness. In his relations 
with God there is something inexpressibly confiden- 
tial and tender and manly and sweet, as if the 
faintest barrier separated them, and the knowledge 
of each other had been from of old. With no servile 
fear on his part and no undue desire to propitiate, the 
rendering of filial trust and love becomes the service 
of a childlike joy. He will not gain God at the cost 
of underrating any part of his creation. God must 
not be glorified at the expense of man. Aspersion 
plays no part in his eminently manly approach to 
divine things. God has first been seen to be good in 
humanity and nature. The worship has basis, and 
finds the Highest no less surely on that account. 



CHAPTER XII. 



IMMORTAL LIFE. 



Thus far, we have seen Jesus in his relations to life 
in general. A step further will show us the larger 
bearings of his principle to life, so considered as to 
leave out no possible sphere and function. His first 
office is the elucidation of the existence of to-day, — 
not in any narrow nor merely material sense, but of our 
existence tested by the highest possibility of now and 
here. Then he proceeds by a fine spiritual logic, not 
stated but everywhere implied, to build up in men's 
minds the conditions, as well as to show the necessities, 
of a life related to the present, although unlimited 
by it. 

It is sufficient to say, in justification of such a state- 
ment, that the possibility of all this, as we can now 
set it forth, has come from Jesus. It is useless to 
claim that he has no logic, no systematic elaboration, 
according to the scientific notion of our day. He is 
no logician, no scientist; but with a subtler, surer 
method, and often fully as much by what he does not 
say as by what he says, he makes plain to the sympa- 
thetic student the law which he himself may reduce as 
far as possible to intellectual statement. This latter is 
not the work of Jesus. Other less great and less en- 



176 JScce Spiritus. 

lightened men can write the specifications of the won- 
derful spiritual mechanism he has fitted to its work. 
It is his principle that makes us capable of such a 
statement, which we therefore do not hesitate to refer 
to him. We may make deductions which he never 
definitely stated; but we cannot carry out his princi- 
ple, everywhere and unmistakably seen, to its full 
application, without finding our inference necessarily 
implied. Nay, more, it will be in the facts which are 
patent to our own observation and experience of life. 
It will be the last word of the best and most enduring 
reality we have ever known. All life is a corrobora- 
tion and restatement of the words of Jesus. What 
he knew so sufficiently in the primitive exj)erience of 
nineteen centuries ago, we know in the light of the 
ripest culture of to-day. The age has borne away 
from the perversions of the Apostolic Church, but 
not from the simple statements of Jesus. But, faintly 
understood, they are yet enthroned in the deepest 
consciousness of the race. We find them in seed 
form, germinal with a possibility which it devolves 
upon us to fulfil, in the Gospels; and we may well 
refer the ripe fruit which haply falls into our hands 
to the parent source. 

We have, however, to proceed carefully at this 
point, as we are now upon the most delicate ground of 
our inquiry, as well as nearest to the heart of the 
whole matter. We are met at once by the inadequa- 
cies of a language formed long before men nad arrived 
even at the conscious necessity for spiritual things, by 
habits of thought and methods of expression which 



Immortal Life. 177 

have become, to a certain extent, fundamental, as well 
as by an attitude common to all ages, but, in some es- 
pecial sense, characteristic of our own, which insists 
upon the employment of scientific principles in the 
proof of spiritual realities. Deprecating none of these 
things, and only too glad of the hints and warnings 
they have thrown in the way of the later exponent of 
spiritual truth, we are confident that language and life, 
and even scientific methods themselves, are sufficient 
to answer the purpose of the most anxious inquirer into 
the principle of Jesus in its application to human need. 

But, to a certain extent, we must start new in our 
work. Much of the old questioning, with its baseless 
stand-point, its talk of hopes and faiths, its willingness 
to hold the understanding in abeyance if it could only 
hear an authoritative utterance from without, must be 
abandoned. We must shift our ground, remodel our 
terminology. We must get inward to the laws and 
facts, and, forgetting to talk about faiths, be satisfied 
only with the necessities of what we seek, as we find 
them grounded in the nature of things. 

At the very outset there is error in the common 
estimate of our means of knowledge, the sphere and 
method by which we are to arrive at certainty of en- 
during life. This has led to serious disappointment 
in many a faithful believer, who has come to think that 
there is something faulty in the position of Jesus. 
Looking, as he thinks naturally, for a definite state- 
ment in a matter so important, and finding it left so 
apparently in darkness, he has been thrown back upon 
himself, without the understanding that that is what 



178 JEJcce Spiritus. 

Jesus wisely intended, and without the insight neces- 
sary to see that in this way his principle comes to 
proof. He hears others assert that Jesus nowhere 
explicitly teaches immortality, and, at best, only im- 
plies it, and is thus at last content to give up the 
matter in inquiry as beyond the capacity of man. If 
Jesus had meant to teach so transcendent a doctrine, 
he would surely not have left it to chance, but fixed 
it in a statement about which there could have been 
no question. 

The radical error in this too common position is the 
readiness to accept vital, personal truth from without 
in the form of finality. It is the undue leaning upon 
authority which Jesus dreads in the attitude of men 
toward himself. Men want it all stated with nothing 
more to be done, so plain that they cannot but accept 
it ; and then how easily they are saved ! But Jesus 
meant there should be no short road to divine things. 
They exist in living verity, and must be duly appro- 
priated. He left out nothing essential in the state- 
ment of the all-sufficient principle, but was careful 
not to defeat the great end by doing man's work for 
him. He had no cheap, easy salvation in mind. To 
picture heaven was not his object, but to build it 
up in human lives. It was all in the principle which 
he announced with sufficient fulness, but we must 
come up to the principle. It cannot come to us until 
we are prej)ared and ready. It must be the lower that 
ascends, and not the higher that descends. The prob- 
lem being already complete in its solution, it remains 
with us to work it out, each one for himself. 



Immortal Life. 179 

To leave for a moment the question of immortality 
and go back to a subject discussed in a former chap- 
ter, we have seen there that Jesus illustrates and 
seeks to impress an original conception of life. He 
lives out in detail, but more particularly in principle, 
an ideal and utterly uncompromising experience, 
which at once separates him from the mass of men ; 
and this through no social nor aesthetic fastidiousness, 
— for he was ever one of and one with the people, — 
but by reason of the originality and strength of his 
conviction. By that life, he was related first to God, 
but secondarily, through the harmonies of a law that, 
though complex and various in working, is ever one, 
to all created and circumstantial things. The fact 
that he filled out the universe with spiritual relation- 
ships did not in the least affect the purity and divin- 
ity of the spiritual principle. In rooting the growth 
of his philosophy (let us not be afraid of the word : 
it is one of our oldest and best, and means more than 
even the schools have dreamed of) deep down and 
firmly in the soil of a natural origin, he in nowise 
curtailed its capacity for mounting to the stars. 
Quite the contrary. It is because of this fact that 
we go the more confidently forward with him, as- 
sured that he will not violate the fundamental cer- 
tainties which our science, and his, have taught us. 
It encourages us to hope for a conscious immortality 
which is consistent, which is natural not supernatural, 
necessary not arbitrary. 

The position of the modern questioner who refuses 
to accept a faith or doctrine in the face of opposing 



180 Ecce Spiritus. 

facts is right in {principle, so far as that principle goes. 
The honest investigator who relinquishes the hope of 
life he would gladly possess because of stern adher- 
ence to the truth as he can see it is, in his way, a 
martyr to the highest. Doubtless there is blame 
somewhere else, if no better, truer method is shown 
him, one which will not contravene, but, rather, com- 
plete the knowledge he has gained in the sphere of 
nature ; but no reproach attaches itself to his honesty. 
The sensitive distrust touching any declaration of cer- 
tainty in regard to a sphere of life which lies, or is 
supposed to lie, entirely outside of this life, with sym- 
bols and terminology different from those which we 
use here at our highest, is, after all, well founded. 
And the only way in which to meet this inborn intel- 
lectual aversion is to show that life, in its largest 
and most enduring relations, requires none of these 
things. The materialist, the boldest scientist, knows 
and believes in life ; and it is only at a certain stage, 
when the physical darkness sets in, and the human 
eye can see no further, that he begins to doubt or dis- 
trust. It is evident, then, that any elucidation of its 
farther reality must lie along the line of that which 
he already knows. He will reject any de novo con- 
cejDtion of an existence added to this he now has 
and given upon arbitrary conditions to complete it. 
Knowing and believing in this which he feels is all 
that he has, he will resent any aspersion upon the 
goodness of this world, and will only be helped 
toward heaven by the discovery that the conditions 
of it are indestructibly bound up in the life of which 



Immortal Life. 181 

he is now conscious. If you will develop the con- 
sciousness of the indestructibility of life out of that 
life of which he is already conscious, there is hope 
that he may be convinced. 

At the outset, Jesus presents no conception of im- 
mortality at variance with or divorced from the facts 
already known. The life he lives is that of nature, 
but the highest step of its most stupendous reach is 
related to the lowest. It is the breath of God, — 
taking breath merely as a symbol to signify the most 
vital function of life, — a part of himself sent forth by 
that creative energy which characterizes infinite 
being, and able by no possibility to drop out of the 
sphere of living things any more than can God him- 
self. If God can die, the soul can. But this is of 
little consequence as a separate fact. If the soul 
cannot know and feel something of all this, it would 
be of little value as a bare statement, open as it is 
to the attacks of material disproof and spiritual un- 
consciousness. Its demonstration or its denial does 
not come within the sphere of external data, but only 
within that of inward experience. This must of 
necessity be so. Such a fact comes under the gen- 
eral law which forbids the sufficient outward demon- 
stration of any reality of inward experience. Nay, 
more, immortality never has been and never can be 
proven in any sense that will satisfy the scientific 
meaning of that term. So far at least, the mate- 
rialist is right, and always will be right. Matter with 
its corresponding symbols in thought is the only 
criterion he acknowledges, and from this test of 



182 JScce Spiritus. 

proof the highest and most perennial truth of being 
will ever be withheld. 

Immortality will never be grasped by the intellect- 
ual faculty alone. Consciousness is the final authority 
upon which it must rest, and consciousness last of all 
rounds itself out into intellectual statement. It is 
valueless as a dogma, since the assertion of another's 
certainty will not answer for oar doubt. We can 
only be satisfied with our own assurance. It is not 
enough even that Jesus knew it, until we, too, have 
been through his process, and arrived at his result, 
— which is nothing, if not personal. 

We are thus thrown back to the wholeness of his 
experience, to the study of the elements out of which 
such certainty of God-knowledge, such self-confidence, 
came. The belief goes with the being. An immor- 
tal sort of life, a life kept close to the imperishable, 
knows of the deathlessness, and none other can know. 
The authority is not arbitrary, but essential. This 
life of God in us has relationship and destiny, as 
well as origin, in the Infinite. It has, moreover, 
powers and functions allied to those of God, by which 
in supreme use and exercise it completes itself. 
These are spiritual, as it is spirit ; while spirituality 
is the consciousness of it and them. But you cannot 
learn these facts from any one, and can only be con- 
scious of them. Then alone do they have meaning 
to you and may be said to be known. God being a 
spirit and man likewise a spirit, how do they come 
consciously together? Man knows and loves, that 
which these functions of intelligence and feeling 



Immortal Life. 183 

comprehend constituting all of life there is for him. 
But as bodily life does not reside merely in the func- 
tions of hand and feet, but more essentially in the 
nerve power that back of both electrifies them into 
motive and motion, so the soul's life is a fine fusion 
of spiritual attributes which moves even back of 
these expressions which we call wisdom and affec- 
tion. The spirit at its highest moment of conscious- 
ness is an entity which will not be put down by the 
partial facts of science. It awaits the larger science 
which shall relate itself not to the superficial, but to 
the essential. 

There is being as the animal knows it, fitful, par- 
tial, and with only at best a faint approach to self- 
consciousness. Then there is the existence of man, 
physically considered, in which self-consciousness, un- 
related as it often is to the supreme facts and possibil- 
ities of his nature, is one of the saddest things in life. 
It is just this in our time which causes the deep un- 
rest, the vague, unsatisfied yearning, the hopeless out- 
look of humanity. It has asked and failed to answer 
the question, Is life worth living? Awakened self-con- 
sciousness is a crying evil, unless it be harmonized 
with the supreme facts of being. Far better to be as 
the brutes, if one must range no higher than they. 
Self-consciousness adds nothing to the joys of light 
and air and food and motion, but only a dread fear, 
an intangible longing, a fitful hope that often grows 
to an ache. 

It was out of a dim understanding of this that all 
the philosophies came, all the systems of thought 



184 JScce Spiritus. 

which have attempted now in one way and now in 
another to reason into harmony and peace an active 
self-consciousness, which was, however, unrelated to 
the higher facts of life wherein alone its order and 
completeness lie. Each one has in turn excited the 
eager curiosity of man's hungry nature, failed to sat- 
isfy, and given place to the next, or continued to 
exist only as a contestant in a noisy war of words. 
Hence came Epicureanism out of this despair, or 
Spartan rigor out of the natural reaction, or Plato- 
nism out of man's last and highest alternative, the 
pure reason. 

But all have failed to meet life's need. They have 
answered much, and given many solutions to near 
and needy questions; but life is as restless and unsat- 
isfied as ever. Nay, more so. The hunger deepens, 
and has already begun to prey upon the vitals. It 
has struck into the heart, and fatally touched man's 
capacity for faith in anything higher than to-day. 
We are better clothed and fed than ever. All our 
powers are active as never before. But still the 
heart, needy and naked, stands shivering in an atmos- 
phere that chills even the first putting-forth of faith. 
Beneath the ever more and more beautiful surface 
the despair deepens. And there is no hope of relief 
and enlightenment except from between the two ten- 
dencies of materialism on the one hand, and the faith 
that compromises with superstition and rejects the 
facts on the other. The time has something to say ; 
and we are willing to accept its disparagement of 
faith unrelated to any other faculty of the mind, and 



Immortal Life. 185 

to rest any satisfaction we may hope to find upon the 
facts alone. The heart itself has something to say 
here as well. But it is out of experience, self-con- 
sciousnes active in the sphere of the highest, that we 
must expect to find the certainty and the reason- 
ableness that will come to refutation in no sphere of 
facts. 

Jesus is at once in harmony with this so common 
attitude, which says that now and here are the basis 
of our knowledge of life, which is unwilling to look 
too much beyond that which is already known. He 
ignores the questions of where and when almost alto- 
gether. He himself disclaims knowledge of details 
as well as indifference to them. So strong and suffi- 
cient in him is the main fact, the reality, that he can 
afford to remain in ignorance. His message is not 
one of " times and seasons," never on the surface, and 
always close to the centre. The golden throne and 
pearly gates are no part of his expression. He is in- 
terested in one thing, and that is life. To know 
this at its fullest is to be conscious of a deathless en- 
ergy, is to participate in realities which are by their 
very nature independent of considerations of time 
and space. He knows that spiritual experience is not 
localized ; that heaven is not here nor there, but with- 
in, in spiritual conditions. He accordingly makes no 
definition, paints no pictures, in no wise maps out so 
vital a possibility. The very depth and certainty of 
his conscious realization is the reason why he has so 
little to say except as to the fact of life. If his ex- 
perience had been more superficial, his explanation 
would have been far more elaborate. 



186 Ecce Spiritus. 

He simply says : A life such as this which I have 
realized, and which is possible to all, a life which is 
consciously related to God through the unfolding and 
development of its spiritual prerogative, emancipated 
even here at its highest from limiting circumstances, 
cannot be destroyed. Nay, more, it is conscious that 
it cannot be destroyed. The life so experienced is its 
own sufficient proof of perpetuity. There is nothing 
to destroy it, nothing higher, stronger, more death- 
less. Of its own self, it cannot cease, except for a 
time, when it lapses into disuse or degradation. It 
can suffer manifold changes in sphere, and, so far as 
its earthly experience is concerned, come under the 
universal law of extinction. But its first assertion 
of itself, its awakened and sovereign consciousness, is 
an ever-growing independence of all limitations, while 
its final assertion is the inward certainty that, what- 
ever else passes, it can never die. It is satisfied to 
let the matter rest in the assurance that, if God can 
cease to exist, so can it. 

Infinite life means the utter absence of even such a 
thought as that of death, and just in proportion as 
any life approaches this perfection in experience will 
it not so much argue the question of immortality as 
forget that there ever was any question. Life is the 
only thing that refutes death. The certainties of a 
future are in those of to-day. You cannot talk death 
to life, for it is alive and takes no account of death. 
But death is ever ready to hear of itself. Death- 
lessness can never be argued nor demonstrated ; but 
it can be known, and that is enough. Life proves 



Immortal Life. 187 

itself in its own way. The consciousness of each 
individual soul is the last witness to which we can 
appeal. Life, as we have already stated it at its 
fullest and highest, needs no qualifying adjective to 
complete its meaning. To one who really lives, the 
term immortal life is tautological. We might well 
spell life with a capital letter, and let the adjective 
go. The adjective confesses too much. It refers at 
once to a doubt in our minds, and means reassurance. 
It weakens the idea it is intended to impress. It begs 
the question: "If we live, then are we alive?" 

Again, the word "immortality" is unfortunate, in- 
asmuch as it puts the emphasis in the wrong place. 
The insistence should be on the positive, not on the 
negative fact, on lifeliness rather than on deathless- 
ness. It is life that we would dwell upon, not believ- 
ing in the value, altogether too much insisted upon, 
of the contemplation of death. Half the vitality 
wasted in discussing death and preparing for a grave 
we shall never by any possibility occupy, expended 
upon positive experience and the preparation to live 
in a cheerful looking forward to life's fulfilment, would 
result in far greater certainty than is within the reach 
of impractical piety. We need a new word, which 
shall have no insistence upon death, but reference 
only to the positive, conscious, and enduring fact. 
The first work of spirituality when its age of suprem- 
acy shall come will be to purify its terminology. 
Language and life have alike suffered in the too fre- 
quent and painful lapse of reality from its symbol in 
speech. 



188 Ecce Spiritus. 

We shall never have peace until we are prepared 
to look for certainty in the sphere of life rather than 
in that of death, and to invert the proverb that in the 
midst of life we are in death. Death is the transient 
and accidental. Life is the central fact, always upper- 
most, always last heard from. We do not refer to 
the feeble faiths and tear-dimmed hopes which have 
so long in a very circumscribed sphere combated the 
stern necessities of death. These have done their work 
in tiding men over the days before the demand and the 
possibility for something higher and more certain had 
come. Indeed, the place of faith has been very much 
overrated in the common scheme of divine things. 
A faith in immortality may have a certain intellectual 
value, although nothing will suffer so much at the 
hands of purely intellectual criticism ; but it has very 
little reality. Immortality as a spiritual conception 
must be grounded deeper than that ; while its power, 
beauty, and reliability as a fact can come only from 
the perception of its necessity, nay, from its very 
conscious and present possession. It must be based 
on some understanding of the laws of life, and of the 
infinite relations life sustains, not only to God as seen 
in nature, but also to God as seen in the special sphere 
of inward observation. When life is so understood, 
the discussions in regard to immortality will cease. 
Then the most sublimated faith will be relegated to 
its place among the things of the race's childhood, 
to be listened to with only a commiserating patience. 
Either let us know that we must, nay, that we do 
live, or let so vast a subject alone. Let us be con- 



Immortal Life. 189 

tented with no half-way methods, no makeshift au- 
thorities, knowing that from the nature of things 
immortality must be near and vital and capable of 
conscious possession, if there is to be any such reality 
at all. It can by no means be held at a distance, and 
considered apart from ourselves. It is no arbitrary 
gift to be imparted later on to non-being. You can 
only give life to life. We are either alive or dead. If 
we are dead, there is no hope of life for us ; for death 
can only receive of its own. If we are alive, all 
knowledge and certainty of life reside in, and can 
only hope intelligently to appeal to, that fact of life. 
If we can die, that is the end of %is ; and there is no 
use of any farther taking stock as to what is left us 
in the future. If one can acknowledge such a possi- 
bility as death in and for himself, — let the word "self" 
be kept to the highest reach of consciousness, and not 
degraded to a narrow transient use, — there is from 
that point onward no grounds for discussion. The 
life has arbitrated for itself, has practically denied its 
being and its conscious Source, and having become 
death can take no account of life. Then the saving 
work does not lie in any possible argument, but sim- 
ply in revivification. 

The salient point in the entire consideration is in 
the supposed ability to die. The first question a soul 
that is thoroughly alive settles is with the facts of 
being. And life of the higher, completer sort has only 
one answer. It is conscious of itself and of nothing 
else. There would never be any death in a man's 
thoughts, if he did not see others apparently dying, 



190 JEJcce Spiritus. 

and hear so much miserable rhetoric that makes 
death-beds the centre of all saving appeal. If a per- 
son has no higher stand-point than this from which to 
address men, if he has no great, positive, breathing 
reality with which to animate and enliven mankind, 
a world already too much befogged and degraded 
would thank him for his silence. Let him speak of 
the fact, not of its accidental phases. Let us have 
the reality, and not the semblance. Men are already 
sufficiently caught in the appearance of things. Life 
is the real, positive, universal quantity that every- 
where needs to be insisted upon. There is no death 
but in feeble, transitory expression. Death plays nega- 
tive to life's grander positive, it is the shade of noon- 
day coolness to the power and intensity of sunlight 
quivering with creative perpetuity. It marks, but it 
neither makes nor unmakes. As a conception, it is 
unworthy any but the most obscure place among the 
thoughts of living and consciously quickened men. 
As a iinality, it shames the very philosophy that is 
willing to split upon its rock. It drops out of the 
mind at a point where it is not so much conquered as 
forgotten. 

Immortality cannot remain a faith. Even material 
certainty is too strong in its positiveness to leave it 
long unassailed. Already, it totters before the rude 
attacks of a scientific attitude and arraignment of 
facts which cannot be gainsaid. Its only alternative 
is to base itself upon still other and higher facts; not 
to oppose, bat to complete law ; to speak consciously, 
or to wait that crownino- moment out of stern life 



Immortal Life, 191 

processes, when at last it shall be able to speak. But 
of feeble whisperings, of plaintive, untaught yearn- 
ings, of vague and misty poetizings, such as have so 
long constituted the stock of religious experience, let 
there be an end. Glimpses of heaven out of tear- 
dimmed eyes play their part in the commoner econ- 
omy of living; but they will not longer be held to 
answer the full requirements of man's nature, nor 
will they longer meet the exigencies of man's grow- 
ing necessity for certain knowledge of the supreme 
facts of being. Either immortality (we must use the 
word for want of a better) is, a fact ingrained in the 
fundamental conditions of being, a necessary part of 
the nature and law of life, or it is not worth talking 
about. Better prepare to accept this world as all, 
and address ourselves to the sole thought of now and 
here, than waste precious moments in vain specula- 
tion as to the future. Speculation cannot hope to 
reach what must be so much a conscious certainty, or 
nothing. 

The day has come when, out of the dire need that 
surrounds suffering and bewildered men, the mystics 
and the poets must step aside; and the man of life, 
not the possessor, but the one possessed, who has been 
led up of life, through nature and the scientist's rich- 
est stores and ripest methods, to the heart and cer- 
tainty of divine things, He must lead them between 
the Scylla of superstition on the one hand, and the 
Charybdis of materialism on the other, to the calm 
open waters of a spirituality which has no quarrel 
with any genuine science or religion. 



192 Ecce Spiritus. 

He, when he comes, will not needlessly attempt the 
proof of being, but will address himself to being 
itself. He will say, if he say anything, that the only 
answer that can come for any question of life must 
come out of life itself; that consciousness — not the 
arithmetic, the crucible, not merely intellectual logic 
— is the sole source of proof. He will talk of life, 
be full to the limitless possibility of its tender, sweet, 
and grand significance. He who sits at his feet will 
find his questions dropping from him. He will forget 
to ask about the future in so plenary a present. The 
self, awakened in him to regal consciousness, will only 
sigh for field and scope in this immensity of being 
into which he has come. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

immortal life (continued). 

There is a point at which what has already been 
said becomes more than an abstract statement, — a 
matter of experimental knowledge. If what has gone 
before be true, it will follow that the lower the plane 
of living spiritually, the less of certainty will be found 
in the belief in the indestructibility of life; while 
the higher the plane, and, in general, in direct ratio 
to its elevation, will be the resultant certainty. 

But by the use of the word " lower " is intended no 
moral implication, but a reference solely to that qual- 
ity of current living by which man feels himself re- 
lated, in some natural and conscious way, with God. 
Indeed, a great deal of the ordinary difficulty in the 
discussion of these matters has arisen here. There 
is a distinctive and oftentimes predominant moral 
development, which, while separating men and women 
from the masses in the quality of their current living, 
and the standards of high and unselfish devotion to 
others, is by no means equivalent to the possession of 
a spiritual capacity quickened into active realization 
of unseen things. There is no reflection upon one's 
moral excellence, because of an innate inability to 
appreciate the delicious harmony of music. Such an 



194 Ecce Spiritus. 

unfortunate incapacity we might commiserate, but 
would hardly condemn. Neither would one in the 
least reflect upon the eminent virtues and graces of 
a character like that of Harriet Martineau, which, 
while perfectly at home and decidedly a power in the 
realm of ethics, was lamentably deficient in that pecu- 
liar sense we call spiritual. And it seems all the 
more trying to be obliged to make such a statement 
of one who so long and faithfully identified herself 
with the cause of practical goodness, without leav- 
ing the least possible reflection upon her life. There 
will always be those who ask if this is not enough; 
who will say, What more and greater could she 
have had? 

But only a slight comparison of her experience 
with that of many another, equally virtuous and phil- 
anthropic and with fully her completeness of mental 
equipment, will convince us of the partialness of her 
capacity. There was a dull hopelessness in her life, 
grand as it was in its aspect of Spartan rigor and 
absolute integrity, but yet grand, as we cannot but 
feel, at the expense of something infinitely truer and 
sweeter and more helpful. If that, indeed, were all 
that was possible to her, consistent with strict intel- 
lectual honesty, then did she do well to die with 
what calmness and composure she might in her 
finalities. For her stern, uncompromising sadness 
was better than any certainties, however sweet, which 
must have been purchased by her at the cost of delu- 
sion. A man would better hide himself in the rocks 
and caves, where no meaningless din of prima donna 



Immortal Life. 195 

may reach him, but only the honester cry of hungry 
crows, than stultify himself with Mozart's praises and 
a headache when there is no room for music in his 
soul. Nevertheless, the testimony of any such shall 
not be taken as to the genuine increase which musi- 
cal possibility adds to life. 

There is nothing sadder than the sadness of such 
people as Harriet Martineau, who with what seems 
the fulness of mental endowment yet miss the one 
faculty that crowns and harmonizes all the rest. 
The much that they are and do, their unquestioned 
effectiveness in many of the most needy quarters of 
life, its charities, reforms, and ameliorations, renders 
it a delicate and certainly a disagreeable task to criti- 
cise. But the fact cannot be overlooked that, where 
they see nothing, others, no more to be despised intel- 
lectually than themselves, find the deepest realities 
and most undeniable facts of consciousness. 

When, therefore, it is said that the certainties of 
life, and the ability from within to ignore the appar- 
ent limitations of that life are determined by the 
plane of living, it will be understood that reference 
is made fully as much to the stand-point and capacity 
of vision as to the theory of conduct. The latter is 
always only an expression of something more radical 
and essential within, and can never be a first-hand 
source of authority. Spirituality does not ignore 
conduct, but addresses itself to that out of which 
conduct springs and of which it is merely an index. 
It has to do with the motives, the will, the aspira- 
tion. It lies in at the heart, although we hear of it 
in manifold forms of expression. 



196 JEcce Spiritus. 

The elevation of this plane (a thought which most 
quickly suggests itself to our minds), it is evident, is a 
matter largely within our control, as well as measura- 
bly dependent upon natural capacity. It is some- 
thing within the easy grasp of a few, born through 
stern struggle and bitter trial in the many, and appar- 
ently beyond the reach of a certain other few, who 
have in them no innate possibility of apprehending 
the spiritual relations of things. That it is open to 
the majority of mankind as a capability that only 
needs culture and exercise to become a conscious 
power is, we believe, just as true as that for a minor- 
ity we can yet see no hope of its communication; 
although, in the latter case, we have no right to judge 
in a matter about which so little is yet practically 
known. The same culture wisely and efficiently 
brought to bear here, that is directed so persistently 
toward superficial acquisition, might reveal a spiritual 
capacity as universal as that of life itself. 

We have no quarrel with Providence in this respect, 
but take the facts as we find them. We have no right 
to arraign the wisdom that sends beings blind and 
deaf and dumb into the world, least of all until we 
have studied deeper into the possible laws which gov- 
ern such incompleteness, and have gained the fuller 
obedience in which lies its prevention. Neither would 
we question the wisdom which permits the too com- 
mon inability to appreciate spiritual reality, assured 
that, when at last the day of fuller science and riper 
obedience shall have come, it will then as well be in 
our power to avert the half conception, and utter 



Immortal Life. 197 

want of real education which ushers into the world so 
many abnormally constituted and undirected beings. 

The more closely people stand related to these 
things, the clearer and more indubitable they will 
appear. But this fact in no degree derogates from 
the positive reality of spiritual things. There is 
nothing which comes within the sphere of our possi- 
ble understanding, which is not bounded by the same 
law. Even the world itself depends for its concep- 
tion in the mind upon the attitude and developed see- 
ing power of the subject. Not as a bare material 
mass, although here there is sometimes difference of 
statement of the same external fact ; but the uni- 
verse, in its larger and higher relations, is not found 
in the hands of men to be one, but manifold in aspects 
and meanings, according to the eye or the mental 
attitude wdiich surveys it. We might almost say that 
no two persons see nature absolutely alike. Hence, 
the possibility of such a word as "original" in the no- 
menclature of poets and thinkers. All, in general, can 
see ; but many, it is evident from countless testimony, 
cannot see what there is to be seen. No intellectual 
person would deny that it was necessary to get close 
to the heart of nature, to study her in constant and 
loving appreciation, to be in willing and receptive at- 
titude toward her suggestiveness, in order to have an 
adequate and a satisfactory knowledge of the world. 
Even here, there are those who answer the commonest 
expression of delight in its beauty with scepticism. 
Even here, in the commoner sphere of outward 
nature, men often need a work which goes to the 



198 Ecce Spiritus. 

root of vision itself. It is the same eye of which 
Jesus spoke so often as seeing, and yet seeing nothing. 
There is no field of inquiry more interesting, in this 
connection, than that of the peculiar limitations of 
the visual organ, — an inquiry that is almost as old as 
the power of vision itself, but which has, of late, come 
into special prominence as a study of scientific and 
practical importance. Daltonism struck a blow at 
the arrogance of the materialist's position, more dam- 
aging than any which could come from the purely 
spiritual side ; and, while its bearings upon the ques- 
tion of spiritual certainty may yet be indeterminate, 
it furnishes a very suggestive field of study and com- 
parison, the possible importance of which we are not 
now prepared to estimate. So much, at least, it has 
demonstrated, — that defective vision is more common 
than absolute blindness, and by no means peculiar to 
any realm of sight, be it spiritual or physical. Not 
only are there persons born with eyes perfect in every 
other respect, who can distinguish only a limited 
range of colors; but it is by no means certain, as is 
acknowledged by those most conversant with the mat- 
ter, that black and white, about which they have no 
apparent difficulty, mean the same to them as to the 
mass of people. The matter is still in dispute, and 
seems likely to find no absolute demonstration. The 
natural or rather unnatural inability to see the true 
relations of moral purity and defilement, or to make 
material and spiritual distinctions, may be only an- 
other phase of the same structural incompleteness. 
One person in every twenty-five is more or less in- 



Immortal Life. 199 

capacitated for distinguishing color. Says Goethe, 
" The remarks made by color-blind persons as to ob- 
jects about them are so perplexing as almost to lead 
one to doubt his own sanity." But they are no more 
so than the asseverations of those who, wanting noth- 
ing else, are impelled to ridicule the things so real to 
others who are possessed of spiritual sight. 

With no disposition to carry this comparison far- 
ther than our present knowledge will allow us, we 
can yet assert that common incompleteness of vision 
has no more bearing against the facts of vision in 
one sphere than another; and if, by reason of this, 
spirituality must be doubted, so must material cer- 
tainty as well. Manifestly, the higher the sphere, the 
rarer the perfection of insight ; and the fact remains 
that the boasted definiteness of matter and its prop- 
erties has been assailed almost equally with the posi- 
tions of spirituality by the science of the day. Further, 
when we come to the assertion that spiritual insight 
is a power to be educated and developed, we find that 
it is supported by the experience of the race, in the 
more primary realm of physical perception. Mr. Glad- 
stone has advanced the theory illustrated from Homer, 
that in ancient times the sense of color was generally 
crude and incomplete; and that, from the time of 
man's initial efforts to see, there has been going on a 
process of gradual development of the organ of vision. 
In other words, nothing was given to man complete, 
but everything, lower as well as higher, subject to 
growth and improvement. Probably there are pro- 
portionately fewer people color-blind in the world 



200 Ecce Sjnritits. 

to-day than in the time of Homer, while the possi- 
bility of still further reducing the proportion is a 
matter in the hands of the scientific educators of the 
day. It may even be found that this is a primary 
step in the direction of that other fuller power of 
sight, which is to be unfolded from within, nay, which 
is to be born into, the human possibility, by those who 
now take up and carry on to practical fulfilment the 
work that Jesus began. 

Evidently, the first thing to be done is to awaken 
the sense of need. The root of the difficulty, with 
the lower class of minds, is in the fact that they ques- 
tion little, because but slightly perceptive of the value 
of spiritual things, and as yet unconscious of any 
want of them in their lives. Among people who 
earnestly desire to go below the surface, the strength 
of this yearning to know is the prime condition of 
enlightenment. But there is on every hand a too 
ready acceptance of such temporary makeshifts as 
come in the way, a willingness to halt at the first rude 
rebuff to a nature keyed to the intensity of longing, 
and in sadness or bitterness to attempt the glorificar 
tion of negative resignation or loud denial of man's 
ability to know. The need is hushed to sleep by 
the song of habitual and uncomplaining indifference. 
The great gain which resides in the fact of its very 
perception is lost, and the advanced position of a 
nature consciously awakened to the want of some- 
thing higher is abandoned to the enemy. 

The vision begins as a possibility in the perception 
of the need. That need is born of life, while the 



Immortal Life. 201 

vision at its fullest exercise creates a new possibility 
of life. He will be apt to live most, who sees most 
and looks most clearly into the things which make up 
and minister to true existence. Accordingly, he will 
go for the root and authority of vision, not to philos- 
ophy nor science, but to life itself. When he would 
ask out of his quickened delight and consciousness of 
being if this can possibly come under any law of 
death, he will go to the same source. What, in an- 
swer, does life say? Nothing save this: that it is 
sufficient unto itself, takes no account of death, ac- 
knowledges none, fears none. Even the pagan Soc- 
rates can say, with a laugh for all his tormentors, 
"Bury me, if you can catch me." It is only when 
one is not conscious of himself that he acknowledges 
a possible grave. But, when he is so conscious, he 
does not stop to argue the question for which there 
is no room in his philosophy. 

Life, at its best, is so large as to crowd out minor 
issues. It is vital and positive, and not too easily 
disturbed. The crown of its elevation and thor- 
oughness comes in a composure that will not be 
lured away from the heart and centre of reality. It 
is not strange, but eminently natural and proper, that 
the thought of death should strike terror to one who 
is conscious of nothing but materiality, whose highest 
intelligence and affection are conceived to be wholly 
bound up in the motions of the body. Death is no 
merely occasional event in the life of man. He does 
not live, physically speaking, for seventy or eighty 
years, and then by reason of a purely new factor, now 



202 JEcce Spiritus. 

for the first time introduced into his experience, die 
once and for all. Death is the constant companion of 
physical existence. Beginning with the first breath, 
it completes itself in tireless process every seven 
years. The man has died all the time that he has 
lived, his life consisting of two complemental proc- 
esses, forever going on side by side, the one a con- 
tinual tearing down of tissue, a waste of vital sub- 
stance, and the other a power of repair, a recuperative 
energy, which is not life itself, but only one phase of 
the physical reality. The nicely balanced thing we 
call life resides fully as much in the waste or dying 
as in the recuperation. It matters not which stops, 
the person dies. It is as fatal to arrest the due pro- 
portion of waste in the system or to overstimulate 
the recuperative activity as it is to lack vital energy 
itself. Physical life does not consist, as many seem 
to think, in the mere ability to repair waste, but in 
the presence of waste as well. Every time he breathes 
or thinks or moves, the man dies, stimulates the proc- 
esses of disintegration, in order that he may take a 
fresh start to live. One day, be it sooner or later, the 
nice equipoise of waste and repair forces within him 
is jostled out of order; and one or the other, it mat- 
ters not which, stops. Then, since dying and living in 
him are no longer preserved in finely balanced adjust- 
ment to each other, he dies utterly. But the signifi- 
cance of the actual moment is vastly overrated in 
our thought. Death has the closest and most vital 
relations to physical life at every point of its progres- 
sive development. The well-taught person, who lives 



Immortal Life. 203 

his life as a problem of infinite possibility at his 
hands, and not as an irresponsible something upon 
which he has a never-failing claim, knows that death 
is not an alien entity introduced into life at the mo- 
ment of its culmination, but only a little more of the 
same sort of which it has ever been made up. 
When it comes, it is with no jar, no break, in the 
continuity even of his thought. It has never been 
absent from his consciousness, even though conscious- 
ness has never acknowledged its essential reality. It 
is one of those things which men may be conscious of 
without ever realizing. 

What wonder that one who knows all this, or even 
is dimly conscious of it, without anything else in the 
inclusiveness of his word " life," should be unable to 
get beyond the grave in his conclusions ! Speaking 
on the higher plane, we are either alive or dead. If 
dead, there seems to be no hope for us but to die still 
further in the contemplation of the annihilist's heaven 
of unconsciousness. There is logical virtue in this 
intellectual conception of the annihilist. It is good, 
relatively, with the merit of all the positive consis- 
tency which can be brought to bear against the posi- 
tions of life. It is infinitely better than the half-way 
platitudes which bring the whole matter of immor- 
tality into intellectual confusion, by claiming an arbi- 
trary existence after death, based upon nothing but 
the say-so of ecclesiastical synods and priestly assump- 
tions. We have not had a good time in this world 
and therefore — oh, much-suffering therefore! — an- 
other world must be provided. As if it took a special 



204 Ecce Spiritus. 

universe to correct the mistakes of the Almighty ! 
Not to be, we say, is infinitely preferable to this 
makeshift immortality, which belies God and belit- 
tles life; which, founded on no adequate reason, 
grounded as a necessity in no universal law, and 
with but little understanding of the life it would 
perpetuate, asserts that imperishable being is to be 
given later on to non-being, by an arbitrary creation, 
as in some sort a religious reward of merit. 

If we are alive, — we do not say have life, for it is 
life that has us, — there is no possibility of our dying. 
Here, as in physical nature, there may be a process of 
death spiritually going on beside, and at times defeat- 
ing, the full consciousness of life. But the only true 
life of which Ave know is related to God, and shares 
by nature and necessity in his indestructibility. 

We have only enlarged the facts already stated in 
regard to life, and carried out to legitimate and nec- 
essary conclusion the principle they illustrate, to 
understand the very simple and logical position of 
Jesus with reference to a future existence. As we 
have described the attitude of the well-taught and 
serious person toward the facts within him and their 
inferences as to the future, so Jesus approaches the 
whole matter. Indeed, it is that which we most rev- 
erence and admire in him. He said so little of the 
future, but fixed it so certainly, so irrevocably, in a 
network of actual present experience in him made 
available to humanity. In him, we ever seem to 
hear the reiteration of the Greek Nemesis, "Not too 
much, not too much," where overstatement would 



Immortal Life. 205 

have undermined his efficacy. We cannot with the 
would be dogmatist deplore the want of explicit 
teaching; nor can we assert with the unbeliever that 
in consequence of this Jesus must be said not to have 
taught immortality. He feels the supreme need of 
keeping their thoughts down to life, and of impress- 
ing its great reality first of all and without any rela- 
tion to conditions of here and there. He must not 
say too much of the future, lest they look ahead and 
forget to live. Nor will he lower his conscious cer- 
tainty to the belittling exigencies of proof. Every 
attempt at demonstrating the doctrine of immor- 
tality, as if it were something that needed proof and 
had to be thrust upon the consciousness from with- 
out, has reacted to the weakening of the faith of 
those to whom it has been directed. The ages when 
there has been least spiritual life have been the ages 
of the most elaborate attempts at proof. Outward 
demonstration is the lame resource of a low state of 
living. 

But read the life of Jesus, and carry out to logical 
deduction the entire drift of his thought, and see if 
the fact of a life unconscious of any possible extinc- 
tion is not everywhere present. Apply his principle, 
as seen everywhere else, and no other result will be 
attainable here. It is basal, and hence out of sight ; 
a part of every-day consciousness, and therefore not 
to be much talked about nor insisted upon. But 
what he does say has in it the positiveness of asser- 
tion, the calmness of a certainty which goes even 
beyond the statement of facts, to the habitual silence 



206 Ecce Spiritus. 

which takes them for granted. There is a root-prin- 
ciple below all his incidental teaching, and to this we 
must go. All that he stood for necessitates and in- 
cludes a conception of life consciously and eternally 
related to God, and unaffected by the fear of death. 
He did not so much reveal immortality, as relieve life 
of the contingency of possible extinction. 

Jesus is here original chiefly in the conception and 
method of his statement rather than in the fact which 
he impressed. The idea of immortality was old, but 
he pushed the idea into reality. Nor will the claim 
put forth by his admirers that he actually originated 
or introduced a life where there was nothing but 
death before, stand the tests of reality. Jesus made 
no such claim for himself, nor could he in the nature 
of things have done so intelligently. The fact of 
enduring life is bound up in the constitution of the 
being received from God, nor could it by any possi- 
bility be divorced from it. Life cannot be given to 
anything which does not already live by virtue of its 
very creation. Death can impart only of itself, and 
life only of itself, but neither can pass into the other. 
Jesus found this fact early in his experience. Then, 
resting upon it as a foundation, he turned his atten- 
tion to men. They, and not the doctrine, are his 
chief difficulty. It was enough for Jesus to have 
brought life and immortality to light. He addresses 
himself to the death in man's consciousness, and finds 
a ready mastery there. The trouble is not that men 
have no potential life. The facts are all on their side. 
But their sole difficulty is in non-realization. Accord- 



Immortal Life. 207 

ingly, he left the facts as they were, fundamental and 
indestructible, and needing no help of his ; and, with 
barely more than a calm inference as to their reality, 
he strove to bring man up to them. They were clear 
to him, but must be made clear to the universal com- 
prehension. The danger is in man, not in the facts 
themselves, which can be surely forgotten or tam- 
pered with or overlooked, but never rooted out. 

Therefore, Jesus directs his effort toward man, and 
not toward the metaphysical difficulty. He is every- 
where practical, and supremely fitted for effective 
savior ship. Let men live up to their full capacity, 
and the work of controversy will stop. The Chris- 
tianity which is to be the outcome of his spirit and to 
carry on his delegated work must be a simple and 
natural evolution of the facts of being out into con- 
scious and supreme exercise. It must show what 
makes against and harms true life, what keeps man in 
darkness and disbelief. It will not say to humanity, 
You in and of yourself are dead, — except in trespasses 
and sins, tamperings with the higher privilege, — but, 
if you embrace a technical form of faith, you will by 
that act inherit an immortality otherwise impossible 
to you. But rather it will say, You can come to con- 
scious perpetuity of life only through spirituality, — 
the method, the spirit, the principle of Jesus. It will 
not say, The prize of your faith will be to live for- 
ever, but To live will be the converting of your make- 
shift faith into a conscious certainty. It will have no 
reference to rewards of merit in its assertions as to 
the future, fearing punishment far less than it loves 
purity and truth. 



208 LJcce Spiritus. 

People ask if they shall live after death who have 
not yet lived at all, and the only answer is Live now! 
As well display the learned conclusions of the college 
before nursery benches as hope to help the world's 
dead with the vision of heavenly glory. The certain- 
ties of the future lie in the positive realities of to-day. 
People think that they can merely exist now, and then 
be ushered by and by into the completest conscious- 
ness and enjoyment of life. But it is worse than use- 
less for one who does not in any sufficient sense live 
now to question as to the hereafter. The problem 
lies nearer home, while the final answer for him must 
yet be far away. The crucial moment is ever the 
present. The wise man has not far to look to find his 
future. And, when the experience of to-day is deep- 
ened and lifted to its limit of current blessedness, 
from that lofty altitude the mysteries of the Highest 
will not be too distant. Indeed, they will be mys- 
teries no longer, except in matters of detail, which 
latter in any sphere are generally interesting in pro- 
portion to the faintness of the perception of the 
central and abiding fact. 

With such a lofty outlook, and an inlook so pene- 
trating and comprehensive, we do not wonder at the 
calm assurances of Jesus' life. We see them taking 
hold of and moulding his entire nature, until the high 
commission grows to be part and parcel of his very 
consciousness; and he lives his own life in living for 
humanity. His was the pivotal experience. His con- 
sciousness of divine things stands ever in from our 
commoner circumference of knowledge, drawing us 



Immortal Life. 209 

to the heart of the great reality. From the centre 
streams the light that makes our object and our 
way plain. It is the illumination of true, perfect life 
shining into and shaming all poorer experience. It is 
God's light, that only fails to brighten the outermost 
circumference of being because men bear too far 
away. The cry then is, To the centre! 



CHAPTER XIV. 



SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS. 



Naturally enough, Christian interest and affection 
have ever centred about the tragic element in Chris- 
tian history. Nothing in the life of Jesus is so effect- 
ive with the mass of people as his sorrows. He is felt 
to be through these things in some especial sense the 
interpreter of the shadier and deeper sides of human 
experience. But nowhere is the attention so fixed 
upon this figure of the man triumphing through 
struggle and suffering as in the closing scenes of his 
life, when he stands helpless and alone before the 
very worst that earth can do. The boy in the temple 
attracts our instant notice. The hint, the promise, the 
suggestion of something mighty to come from this pre- 
mature intentness, gives an engaging flavor of romance 
to the deep-felt seriousness his words and attitude 
inspire. We are powerfully moved by the man met 
at the threshold of active life with the peculiar temp- 
tations of genius, — tempted, as such are, not so much 
from without as by the strong and as yet unsubdued 
energies in his own soul. We feel the eager beating 
of that Jewish heart, in which age-long hopes and 
deep popular currents of feeling had culminated. 
We seem to see the race in conflict with a new-found 



Symbolism of the Cross. 211 

motive to the Highest in this fine, susceptible nature 
of its crowning character. It is the past, the nation's 
heart and history, the hardened fibre of its traditional 
thought and life, struggling against a principle which 
has now, for the first time, emerged into the con- 
sciousness of a representative it is not prepared to 
receive. But, when the tragic element that runs 
through all the lonely experience — the self-abnegna- 
tion from within and the painful opposition from 
without — culminates in the cross, all other feelings 
are merged in profound reverence for the man. 
Everything has led up naturally to this point. It is 
what we must have expected, feared, hoped, from the 
beginning. It did not seem difficult to picture this 
character, so consistent everywhere else, in this 
crowning, ordeal that was to come. But, when he 
actually comes before us bearing his cross in a double 
sense, — a sense we can scarcely hope to comprehend, 
— from which he rather seems to suspend himself, 
through that strong bending of his nature to higher 
necessity than to answer any trivial end of his tor- 
mentors, we are forced from our attitude of criticism 
to that of pure wonder and awe-stricken love. But 
the exigencies of our later mood, while not in the 
least affecting these primary inspirations, call for an 
understanding of this most striking and characteristic 
event in human history. If it be merely the pageant 
of a man dying for his convictions, as countless 
others in times before and since have done, we shall 
only vouchsafe to this particular martyrdom a mo- 
ment of our long attention and wonder at the mighty 
sacrifices of men. 



212 JEcce Spiritus. 

If this be all, Jesus is no sterner, no more fearless 
and uncompromising, than many a Hebrew prophet, 
and is at best but the beginning of a new series of 
martyrs in a cause that, though newly named, is as 
old as humanity itself. This is a common spectacle 
in the history of every religious system. There are 
none of them which have not been built up on daily 
and final crucifixions innumerable. And it is not 
until we discover the original motive and meaning in 
this crucifixion of Jesus that it becomes charged 
with peculiar impressiveness for our minds. Mani- 
festly, so individual a character, a life so utterly 
moulded to singleness of aim, and guided by a prin- 
ciple never for a moment lost sight of, must have 
intended more than a simple spectacle in so hack- 
neyed a resource. It cannot be that we reverence 
Jesus merely because he was a martyr, but because 
of some peculiar and all-sufficient import in the sacri- 
ficial act. 

The Christian world has done well to insist upon 
the mighty meaning and saving efficacy of the cross; 
but, when we come to the almost universal under- 
standing of what is comprehended in that word, the 
idea for which it stands, approbation is not so easy. 
As a symbol, it has been made readily effective, capa- 
ble as it has been of conceptions popularly useful, but 
neither accurate nor adequate to the highest needs. 
It is said that the cross symbolizes an act of substitu- 
tion, that Jesus in this painful process of dying took 
upon himself the sins of mankind, paying for them 
and pacifying offended Deity by his blood, — a view 



Symbolism of the Cross. 213 

utterly abhorrent to our most fundamental and cher- 
ished notions of God, as well as hostile to all the 
known facts in regard to sin and its possible vindi- 
cation at the bar of broken law. It mutilates the 
character of that consistent Being who works so nat- 
urally and orderly by processes grounded in the law- 
abiding structure of things. It so wars against our 
root conception of what God must be, if he be at all, 
as to invite the alternative of consistent atheism 
rather than this conception of a contradictory Provi- 
dence. God does not need to be appeased by butch- 
ery; nor have his laws 5 ordained in the beginning, 
ever yet failed to take care of sin in their own good 
way and time. By no possibility of divine or human 
law could one being bear the sins of another, or one 
death in any degree remit the universal penalty 
thereof. Sin is a violation of law; and Jesus said he 
would save from sin, but it was by restoring the 
law to its supremacy. It had reference to future 
transgressions rather than to penalty for those already 
committed. His salvation was one from sinfulness, 
from sin in the singular, and all disposition and desire 
to trespass, rather than from sins. He would not 
pamper, bat perfect the race. Least of all would he 
take away the necessary expiation wrought out in 
suffering in every individual soul, by which alone it 
can hope to be purified. 

Without entering upon a technically theological 
discussion, we need not suppose as a motive of the 
cross any such strained and arbitrary disposal of 
human responsibility for sin, so long as law can be 



214 JBcce Spiritus. 

seen to be adequate for such an end; nor have we any 
right to ascribe to Jesus in this one experience a con- 
ception of God which violates the entire spirit and 
teaching of his life. 

Nor can we agree in that view which regards the 
cross as a necessary test of unselfish devotion to man- 
kind. This supposed motive still needs a farther 
motive, a specific end to be gained, inasmuch as to 
merely die for another is a questionable service. Our 
ideas of martyrdom have been modified to this extent 
that we now think it a greater test of devotion to live 
in self-sacrificing helpfulness to one's friends than too 
easily to resign the struggle. We are all familiar 
with the terror of death, but there are no sensitively 
organized natures that do not dread many of the 
alternatives of living more. In spite of all our shrink- 
ing, the fact remains that death is one of the readiest 
solutions for countless evils, a solution which men 
accept every day rather than face the inevitable. 
Voluntary death is not a common type of courage, 
but of cowardice. Bitter as the ordeal of death is, it 
takes vastly more bravery and strength of character 
to live than to die. 

" When all the blandishments of life are gone, 
The coward sneaks to death — the brave live on." 

The sufferings of parting from the flesh are as noth- 
ing to the despair and miseries of earth. Criminal 
statistics show that the almost universal choice of 
State prisoners is the gallows rather than such life 
as is left to them, while the annual record of suicides 



Symbolism of the Cross. 215 

indicates which way the balancing stands in many 
minds. There are many things, evidently needful 
and salutary to be borne, which men would rather 
die than meet. The courage is all on the side of 
living. 

Jesus sees this, and it is in no temporizing spirit that 
he approaches his martyrdom. He can look ahead 
and see what is before him, a life whose trouble at the 
best would far outweigh any that he has ever known, 
a life of hunted tearfulness, of strange and bitter 
vicissitudes, of faithless friends and implacable ene- 
mies, a life stripped of joy and rest because of this 
salvation men despised. He knew that the short-lived 
agony of the cross was preferable to this. The shame 
of it could not touch his conscious purity. The pain 
of it could not daunt one already pained to his being's 
core with the almost universal spiritual death of the 
people he loved and tried, with so little apparent suc- 
cess, to serve. He saw that, if it were possible in the 
exigencies of the higher purpose which by his martyr- 
dom he was to subserve, it would have been better for 
him to live. Spiritually, they needed the contact and 
constant inspiration of the man. They would suffer 
for the want of his clear insight into shams, his caustic 
rebuke of all superficiality, his moving assertions of 
oneness with God. He foresaw, what speedily fol- 
lowed his death, the temporizing and worldliness, the 
fatal tendency to formalize, that sprung up the moment 
his living influence was withdrawn. Doubtless, he 
longed to stay, had not a grander necessity absorbed 
his attention. He did not accept the cross as the 



216 Ecce Spiritus. 

opportunity for a great spectacular triumph, which 
should henceforth catch the wandering thoughts of 
men, and call to himself ready sympathy and not over- 
discriminating regard. The great spiritual hero of 
humanity stands above any such vulgar resort, with 
attention fixed alone upon the heart of things and the 
very highest possible motives. 

As yet we have found no intelligence in the crown- 
ing act of the great Christian drama. We still lack 
adequate motive for so commonplace a claim upon the 
admiration and wonder of mankind. If we go no fur- 
ther than this, the cross rather tends to weaken than 
to strengthen our regard, seeming, as it does, so 
unworthy of the exalted mind, the consistent and pro- 
gressive purpose of the man. So far, Ave have not 
seen, what ought certainly to appear, the necessity for 
the cross. We cannot fully yiel 1 our reverent allegi- 
ance until we see some place that it is to fill in the 
unbroken chain of Christian influences. Its sacred 
significance lies not with us, but in itself. We are not 
responsible for even our indifference, before it has 
shown some mighty claim in and of itself to our faith 
and affection. 

Jesus, then, was here, as before indicated, for the 
full and perfect development of the spiritual idea. 
This was his sole object, — the complete triumph of 
spirit over everything else, and the due subordination, 
not condemnation, of matter. There are eternal con- 
siderations, and low and temporal ones. What is 
their order and place in the true scheme of life? 
That is the one vital question of life and religion. 



Symbolism of the Cross. 217 

Jesus had shown this everywhere else, had proven the 
principle in every minor issue of experience; and 
there yet remained for him the supreme test, the 
crowning expression, which, was to fix. the application 
for all emergencies and forever. His way to the 
headship of the race lay through martyrdom of the 
lower to the higher. Without the cross, his system 
would have been incomplete. It meant sinrply No 
Compromise. 

Bit how? Could he not have shown this in some 
other way than dying? Let us ask again, What wars 
against spirit? The answer is, Low subserviency to 
matter. What stands in the w r ay of life? Death. 
If men can rise above these two in conscious suprem- 
acy, their salvation is assured. But to meet death 
from the stand-point of superiority is both the most 
difficult and most comprehensive test. As an ordeal, 
it tries as nothing else the strength and fineness of 
our spiritual vision. It is not one of the issues, but 
the issue of experience, most sharply outlining as it 
does the two spheres and the respective motives of 
each. If spirit is to triumph, here is the thick and 
bitterness of the fight. 

But this is not all. Our motive is not yet complete, 
until we see the peculiar necessity which existed for 
this in the case of Jesus. At the very outset, the spir- 
itual principle for which he stood was brought into 
contrast with considerations of external grandeur and 
power. All through his ministry, he struggled with 
a gross and radical misapprehension in the minds of 
his followers. To them, he was the possible restorer 



218 JEcce Spiritus. 

of the lost Jewish splendor, which all their traditional 
expectations had taught them to look for in a Messiah. 
Even at the last, the old hope had not been completely 
rooted out, in spite of the stern rebukes of the Mas- 
ter, who was offended by nothing more than by this 
clinging literalism, this narrow nationalism, against 
which his pure spirituality seemed to make so little 
impression. The conviction grows with him that this 
attitude on their part, which is typical as well of the 
attitude common to all men and times, must ever stand 
in the way of a complete realization of his object. 
The line must be closely and clearly drawn, the tem- 
poral distinguished from the Eternal. The spiritual 
must rise up clear of the low entanglements of sense. 
The spiritual must be all in all. It had become neces- 
sary, such were the conditions surrounding him, to 
yield something, to compromise somewhere, or to suf- 
fer at the hands of the powers he had offended. He 
could not longer carry on his work, and hope to escape 
the vigilance that was waiting to entrap him. If he 
would not yield his principle and mitigate his inci- 
dental hostility to the Jewish Church and the Roman 
government, he knew that he must die. He could not 
compromise. Hence the alternative. 

But in all this there was more than a simple dying 
for the truth. It was in a special sense the natural 
and necessary evolution of his spiritual principle out 
of abstract conditions into organic unity and practical 
effectiveness. He did not die merely to avoid re- 
nouncing his position, but to carry out and fulfil it. 
It was a positive, not a negative step in his progres- 



Symbolism of the Cross. 219 

sive career. It had meanings deeper than at first 
sight appeared. Dying, under such circumstances, be- 
came the only life. It was in reality a life issue with 
him, and not one of death. It was the insistence on 
the essential, the grand assertion of indifference, on 
the part of one so occupied with the vital fact, to all 
accidental phases of experience, which is the neces- 
sary condition of true life everywhere. It was here 
that the spiritual neophyte would halt and fear and 
tremble in the insufficiency of all partial acceptance 
of the highest. Death is the door at which all sys- 
tems of faith wait in trial; but the spirituality of 
Jesus takes the initiative, and tries death itself at 
the bar of a conscious and positive superiority. The 
suspended Christ means this, — means spirituality. 
The body is there, but we do not see it. Least of 
all would we try to picture the cross in all its gross 
and hideous details. We would not linger too long 
on the outward symbol, hastening on to the real 
cross, which was and is inward. It was the soul 
that triumphed, not the body. It is spirituality that 
comes out clear and distinct from the fading outlines 
of the earthly man at rest in the painless sleep of 
death. 

But mark the j)eculiar conditions of Jesus' martyr- 
dom. He was young, barely past thirty, in the full 
health and vigor of early manhood. The records do 
not agree with the common impression which makes 
Jesus one of that order of beings which we call effemi- 
nate and poetic. They represent no weakly dreamer, 
but a man whose life was passed out of doors, whose 



220 Ecce Spiritus. 

arms were apt at labor, and whose pulses were keyed 
to the enjoyment of uninterrupted health. No phase 
of nature, and nature's zest in purely physical bright- 
ness and perfection, escaped him. There are no mor- 
bid fancies, no touches of melancholy, in this emi- 
nently healthy nature, which so willingly relinquished 
a world it loved for the sake of that which demanded 
greater love and allegiance. Indeed, that world meant 
both more and less to him who read deeper into 
its meanings than to those who lived upon the sur- 
face. Surely, he was not incapable of being stirred 
by the prospects which in a special sense it held out 
to him. Not yet was he hunted and persecuted to 
the extent of weaning him from the love of the 
world. He did not die a weary, broken-down, dis- 
heartened man. But two years had passed since he 
began his wonderful work, a period full of many 
inspiring thoughts and pleasant memories; and he 
was yet fresh and free and youthful. There were no 
wrinkles on the forehead of the face, which in its 
dark outlines bore the sternness of the prophet race 
from which he was descended, together with the 
marks of that later and peculiar fineness which had 
stamped him as of a new race. Although estranged 
from Judaism, he was yet a Jew in all outward char- 
acteristics, and had none of the Grecian fairness 
which Christian idealism has ascribed to him ; never- 
theless, the character and physique were Grecian in 
that pure and painless love of nature, which reacted 
in physical health and harmony. 

Contrast the sickly body of Paul, with its evident 



Symbolism of the Cross. 221 

influence on his mind, his hasty and sometimes narrow 
judgments, his sudden shif tings of religious ground, 
his volcanic impetuosity of temperament, with the 
calm and normal poise of Jesus' nature. Paul was 
always longing for martyrdom, only too ready to con- 
front death with his consuming zeal. Jesus, on the 
other hand, approaches his cross in calm deliberation 
and a full conviction of the meaning of the act. He 
will not be caught unaware nor surprised into the sit- 
uation, observing the wise caution of a man who is to 
make external misfortune serve an end determined 
from within. He will not hasten the end ; but, as the 
end draws near, he will himself go to Jerusalem. 

So the sacrifice of Jesus becomes representative. 
It is a man giving up all of the lower; we do not use 
the word merely in its moral relations, but relatively, 
as referring to spheres of enjoyment that might offer 
a possible compromise with the highest. His posi- 
tion is inclusive, and covers all the ground. In all of 
its shadows, the light of his pure principle is clearly 
brought to view. Jesus could not have perfected his 
spirituality and made it plain to others in any differ- 
ent way. From one side, it has many relationships 
with the lower, as being the higher law that completes 
it, but also, from another side, it stands out opposed 
and uncompromising. The antagonism of matter is 
not in itself, but in the human attitude which accepts 
the material in place of something more enduring. 
The cross is that line of demarcation between com- 
promise and conscientiousness, whereon is the rad- 
ical insistence of Christianity. Along this line there 



222 JEJcce Spiritus. 

is nothing given man to enjoy in which it is not law- 
ful to participate. But until this line is fixed, not 
arbitrarily, but as an essential, vital principle, not as 
a narrow letter, but as the very spirit of nature's laws, 
it is useless to talk of salvation. It was necessary, 
then, that Jesus should put this principle to severest 
test. He must furnish not a single ray, but the broad 
sunlight of life. There must be no situation and no 
emergency uncompr eh ended in his sublime attestation 
of the highest. So long as he can live out his prin- 
ciple, he will gladly live; but it must be the princi- 
ple that lives, and no vain semblance of himself. Up 
to the date of the cross, he had shown his principle 
of life : then and henceforth, it showed itself and him. 
lie did not die, but life as a concession and death as a 
terror. 

The spiritual facts were structural, but this was 
their first realization and expression. God had never 
been afar off, but now he was near in possible con- 
sciousness. Sin was still here, but it had come under 
a new law. Men were called upon not to think too 
much of their imperfections, but to dwell on the 
highest. Human lowness had found its alternative. 
In them, the alternative was to live the higher; in 
him, it was to live also, until a compromise ajDpeared, 
and then it was to die. He did, indeed, bear the 
sins of the world in his suffering to show men the 
way of life, but he was no spiritual Atlas with human- 
ity's load on his back. He bore them rather in the 
hand of a new and better possibility. A soul was 
born in them, with at last the conscious power to 
transform, not deny, the inheritance of matter. 



Symbolism of the Cross. 223 

So a natural, healthy spirituality rises out of the 
grave, calling upon mankind in practical application, 
not necessarily to die for its attainment, but to vital- 
ize in experience the principle of life it brought to 
manifestation. To live is the burden even of the 
cross. 



CHAPTER XV. 

THE FAITH OF THE FUTURE. 

The test of a religion being its practical effective- 
ness, — the widest possible adaptability to the need of 
men both individually and collectively, — what shall 
we say of Christianity as it has been herein considered 
in view of this demand ? Surely, all has not been said 
in the fullest statement of its abstract relations. The 
question still remains unanswered, whether religion is 
to pass from the common keeping of the race and 
become a sublimated and purely individual commun- 
ion between man and God. Are the needs of human- 
ity as such to be left unrecognized in any future ser- 
vice? Is the human element to disappear from the 
worship of God, man caring no longer for the nearness 
of man, but only for union with the divine? In short, 
is a church possible without supernaturalism ? Is 
there any bond of sympathy and fellowship in a pure 
Christian spirituality? 

Manifestly, the time for such a criticism will come 
when it is seen how the principle of Jesus creates a 
new life and dependence in the individual soul, estab- 
lishing as it did in his case, and does in the case of 
all, direct relations with the Father, and putting the 
law of life in the heart and members over any 



The Faith of the Future. 225 

external statement or bond of union. Not only will 
this spiritual independence be urged against it, but 
also that the strength of religion as a power in the 
world has ever been in the creeds and formulas 
which have banded and kept men together in a tan- 
gible sort of way. 

But, whenever the criticism may come, the question 
as to the continuance of the Church is already here, 
born not of any fresh interpretation of Christianity, 
but of that earlier traditional form which with all its 
practical and tangible appliances has been so long on 
trial before the world. The negative spirit of the 
age, the product of false assumption and unreason in 
religion, has reached not only to the theologies, but 
to the instrument of all theologies, the Church itself. 
One whose interests and affections are still in the 
sanctuary is startled and disturbed by the frequently 
expressed opinion that the Church has had its day, 
and will in the future be voted inoperative and obso- 
lete. A ready reference is had to the statistics, which 
reveal a steadily decreasing rate of church attendance, 
a falling off in that practical test of faith which leads 
young men to prepare themselves for the work of the 
ministry, as well as a universal lessening of that tradi- 
tional reverence paid aliRe to ordinances and func- 
tionaries in the Church, which is the surest sign when 
found that organized religion lias a vital hold upon 
the people. The drift of the age is seen on the one 
hand in that return to ecclesiasticism which means 
retreat from the living issues of the day to safety 
within sanctified walls ; and on the other in the more 



226 Ecce Spiritus. 

wide-spread and characteristic tendency toward indif- 
ference as to surroundings and toward simplicity of 
method in the public approach to God. Between 
which two, it is feared that the instrumentalities of 
religion are losing their influence, and that, whatever 
of unseen and individual communing there may be, 
there will soon be no longer any "visible church"; 
that whatever religion may run the gauntlet of nine- 
teenth century criticism will remain a personal experi- 
ence rather than seek to become a public expression. 
There can at the outset be no doubt that religion 
is primarily personal and private. Christianity in the 
hands of Jesus becomes in the main an individual 
oneness with God, so irresistibly full and inspiring as 
to constitute its chief leverage for moving men. The 
mighty aim and inference of his completed work is 
the establishment of like personal communion in all 
men. With Jesus, they are to first realize God 
within. All other steps fail until this is accom- 
plished. The individual is first and last; but Jesus 
shows clearly the qualification which cannot for a 
moment be overlooked, that the individual finds 
accretion and completion from two sides, the human 
and the divine. There is a law of the soul, broader 
than that of strict individualism, which necessitates 
sympathy and strength in union, which asserts that 
any adequate view of religion must not only recog- 
nize creator and child, but be as truly the unit of 
human interests, making men one in the highest, har- 
monizing race life, and establishing out of multiform 
humanity the crowning order of Mankind. 



The Faith of the Future. 227 

Religion can never be divorced from the widest 
possible conception of a Good and a True that are not 
merely personal and peculiar, but in the best sense 
universal. It exists to bring God and man together, 
but also, since the way between them lies at least in 
jDart through humanity, to find a nearer relationship 
of man to man. It has to do with the higher family, 
founded on more enduring ties, of which God is 
surely Head, but to which no child of his is wholly 
unrelated. Man's love to God must ever be man's 
love to man. Every approach to divinity is a new 
step taken in the direction of the highest human rela- 
tions. There is no possible partialness in the highest 
expression of man's nature. 

This being so, the demand, the necessity for a 
church, will still exist with the survival of the relig- 
ious instinct, no matter how many changes in its out- 
ward form may come. It may or may not be true 
that the plainest assembly room will be deemed suffi- 
cient, or even that the " Forest Hymn " of Bryant will 
supersede the costly chants of the sanctuary in a 
worship beneath the skies and trees. We are not 
concerned with incidentals, but with the vital fact 
that service of some sort, in which there is the union 
of man to God and man to man, on a higher plane 
than the ordinary, is an essential part of religion. 
More even than this, it is born of the needs of human 
nature, and not in any danger of being outgrown until 
that nature itself radically changes. But here we 
have a fixed quantity. Experience is one and the 
same thing for all ages. It is the old sorrow that 



228 Ecce Spiritus. 

mirrors itself in every fresh-falling tear. Our joy is 
as ancient as life. There is in general no new expe- 
rience and no new need. There is different consist- 
ency and relation in the elements of life, but life's 
problem and hunger repeat themselves in tireless 
adherence to the purpose they were given to serve. 
Comforts and alleviations, new data and fresh incen- 
tives, in no wise essentially modify that hunger of 
the nature for human nearness and spiritual help. A 
stricter logic may enter into the mental acceptance, 
but the condition of want is a never-varying quantity. 
And, until the facts of human nature change, we need 
not be apprehensive of any greater indifference to the 
true service of God. 

Indeed, with the purification of the instrument, 
which must follow a clearer conception of spirituality 
as it was in Jesus, we must believe the Church will 
attain fresh suggestiveness and meet more general 
acceptance. The worn-out associations will take on 
a new significance as God comes closer to the realiza- 
tion of men, and as men in ever-widening circles of 
knowledge grow to a truer understanding of each 
other and themselves. New life and beauty, and a 
power never dreamed of before, will come to a com- 
munion that asks for no compromise on the part of 
any believer, which demands for its acceptance the 
entire rounded orbit of man's faculties. The bond 
will be sweeter, stronger, which is found in the com- 
mon nature of men, and not in arbitrary conditions 
which require either a peculiar mental constitution or 
an intellectual compromise for their reception. 



The Faith of the Future. 229 

A church is the formulation of the religious idea. 
It is spirituality organized. There is a public life as 
there is a private, and with it the necessity for a pub- 
lic as a private recognition of the Being who is as 
truly the Father of Humanity as of the individual 
soul. In any other than a purely selfish conception 
of its character and mission, religion must meet the 
wants of the race viewed in their most comprehensive 
aspect. But here is seen the chief difficulty. Here, 
primarily, the assumed Church of Christ found its 
greatest stumbling-block. To organize effectually and 
lastingly is one of the most difficult of undertakings 
in any sphere, and it is especially so in spiritual mat- 
ters. The bond must be firm, but at the same time 
elastic. It must not be from without, but from 
within. It must represent the love and mental alle- 
giance of the subject, and that, too, in their develop- 
ment rather than in any period of apparent fixity. 
There must be conviction, but no coercion, in its 
adherence. It must touch the purpose it would sub- 
serve at the one vital point, leaving all unessentials to 
the easy play of individualism. 

Mark how absolutely fitted to such a standard was 
the Master's own requirement. Jesus was too prac- 
tical not to see the necessity for combined and con- 
centrated effort in an age so spiritually dead as the 
one to which he especially came, and he organized 
such elements as he could find to spread the gospel 
life and light. But what simplicity of method, what 
understanding of human nature, and of the theoret- 
ical necessities of truth in its spread and continuance! 



230 JScce Spiritus. 

Such as come to him, touched with the new fire from 
heaven, he sends unto all nations. First, they are to 
go, half the consecration resting in the readiness, the 
willingness, and determination to do something. Then, 
they are to preach the gospel to all men. The gospel 
was the bond of organization. And what was it? The 
good news. And what news so good, so important, 
so sufficient for unitizing purposes ? That a way had 
been found back to the Father, a way so simple, so 
sure, so comprehensive that henceforth there need 
be no stumbling along blind theologic paths; that 
God had been brought back from that far corner 
of the universe where a false Jewish reverence had 
thrust him, to a possible realization that indeed 

" Closer is He than breathing, and 
Nearer than hands and feet " ; 

that man had found himself anew, in the facts of a 
nature perhaps hitherto suspected, but now for the 
first time consciously known ; that the plane of life 
was lifted \ that human nature had passed from heir- 
ship to something of inheritance in the divine ; that 
new dignity and grander responsibility were awaiting 
the acceptance of a higher human destiny. It was 
peace on earth and good-will to man. Not immunity 
from outward struggle and warfare, — for Jesus said 
that he came to bring not peace, but a sword, in this 
sense, — but inward harmony, self-containment, spirit- 
ual tranquillity. No guide can take us beyond the 
battles, but this one shows us that in soul equipoise is 
the only possibility of peace. It was an adjustment 



The Faith of the Future. 231 

and reconciliation of all shortcomings and contentions 
out of a spiritually awakened and regally conscious 
nature. It was such good-will to men as was willing 
to live this out before them in the face of every 
temptation and sacrifice. 

There were, to be sure, other incidental commands 
as to the manner of their going, the purely spiritual 
attitude they were to assume toward those to whom 
they preached ; but, in general, the bond that held them 
to a single aim was the ability and willingness to live 
the life he did, and to restore men in the same silent 
and effectual ways to their conscious manhood. He 
organized his followers solely on the basis of practical 
effectiveness. There was no doctrinal test in their 
coming or their going. To believe in spirituality as 
it was in him was the only requirement. The bond 
had reference to mutual helpfulness, charity, sympa- 
thy in action. It was to do something, with reaction- 
ary effect upon men, not on the Church. The Church 
was made for men rather than man for the institu- 
tion. 

Such, we believe, the bond will be in the future. 
The organization of the Church will be inclusive, not 
exclusive, and will exist to do the needed Christ-like 
work among all classes of sinning and suffering men. 
Philanthropy, charity, enlightenment, and all manner 
of unselfishness and goodness, will be the gospel that 
shall bring men together, and hold them in unity. 
Spiritual propagandism will take the place of sectari- 
anism, oneness of spirit and intention will supersede 
community in opinion. 



232 Ecce Spiritus. 

A glance at the thought and life of our time will 
show that the drift is in this direction. There is a 
sense in which men are growing apart, in which 
individuality is taking the place of the old-time 
dependence of one upon another. The race is 
stronger, more self-centred than formerly; and the 
element in social life which deified the pattern in men 
has given place to that of independent personality. 
And yet in many ways, and on the whole, the ten- 
dency seems to be in the other direction. Individ- 
ualism has culminated in an age of coldness and 
exclusion, and out of the undue pursuit of selfish 
ends comes a desire to draw closer the lines of com- 
mon interest and helpfulness. The necessity is felt 
upon every hand of reducing as far as possible the 
waste of living by sharing minor cares and responsi- 
bilities. To combine, to concentrate, to simplify, is 
the desideratum of an age in which life has become 
complex. Race existence first tends to spread itself : 
then there comes the need of a closer union. A social 
and an intellectual life so vast as ours is the condi- 
tion of an immense loss in possible power, and men 
are seeing that the only resource is to get nearer 
together again. Inventive genius, that is doing so 
much to simplify all processes of toil, cannot obviate 
the necessity for that centralized social effort by 
which alone human life is made easy and pleasant. 
Indeed, it is working precisely in this direction. 
It annihilates distance, enabling men to exchange 
thoughts from separate homes or places of business, 
nay, from continent to continent, almost as readily 



The Faith of the Future. 233 

as if they were in the same room. There is no 
longer any isolation. Our city streets and railway 
lines, even ocean itself, have become great whisper- 
ing galleries, in which all the world becomes as one 
family. There is a movement in large cities looking 
toward many homes in one, where the care and 
drudgery of separate households, by being shared, 
are felt by none ; and in the country the same ten- 
dency is working toward a village life based upon new 
scientific and social conditions, which shall do away 
with the loneliness and dearth of resource which char- 
acterize ordinary farm existence. The old-time am- 
plitude of surroundings, with its attendant individ- 
ualism, gives way before a constantly increasing 
population. Outward need and intensifying experi- 
ence demand the sacrifice of a few for the good of 
the many. Civilization cannot go on without this 
consolidation for mutual convenience and improve- 
ment, and its work will be seen in the future still 
more than in the past. 

The inevitable result of this is a more intimate 
knowledge of the affairs of men and nations, and an 
intensification of the feeling of human brotherhood. 
The community of human interests is established on 
a new and firmer basis. Our close commercial rela- 
tions, our wide-spread means of almost instant infor- 
mation, in a day when the press is the gossip-monger 
of the world, have tended to break down the barriers 
of ignorance and prejudice which keep men apart. 
Education is of the comparative sort, inclusive, not 
exclusive. Attention was formerly given entirely to 



234 JEJcce Spiritus. 

the "branches," but now it is the root below all 
branches toward which in their separate study the 
effort is directed. A science or religion, a history 
or language, can only be left when its relativity to 
others and the whole is ascertained. It is not con- 
sidered by itself, so much as with reference to sci- 
ence, religion, history, or language in their entirety. 
The remarkable stimulus of steam was not confined 
to external enterprise, but had as well its influence 
upon charity, fellow-feeling, oneness of thought and 
life. While the sects have been separating men, a 
stronger current in the life of the world has been 
slowly drawing them together. Religion is now more 
frequently seen to be one, as government is ; and it 
is the people, not priest nor potentate, who have 
both in hand. "Behold the people is one," is again 
the cry in a new and far more fundamental sense 
than that it took as the utterance of Hebrew race 
life. The people is one, and nothing that deeply 
concerns its slightest part can be a matter of indiffer- 
ence to the whole. A Church is coming, independent 
of state or artificial process^ out of this very com- 
munity of life and interest, which will more nearly 
realize that simple social life in things religious which 
Jesus created and sanctioned. The arbitrary barriers 
which have separated men, and the externalities 
which have been as stumbling-blocks, will still further 
give way to conditions common to all, leaving noth- 
ing to be gained by any form of exclusion. Even the 
practical tone of life in general will be in accord with 
the natural desire for all hek>ful and generous com- 



The Faith of the Future. 235 

munion in the most central and inspiring sphere of 
existence. There will be more rather than less relig- 
ious association in the future, when the greatest 
spiritual good of the greatest number shall be the 
motto of the true Church of God and man, in which 
sign and symbol shall in no wise shut the soul from 
either the perception or the realization of truth. 

This cannot come until the sacredness and power 
of the Church have been accepted from a new stand- 
point in the minds of men. Not until it is regarded 
for more than its archaeological interest, as a mere 
link with the past and that which preserves the 
sacred, will it come to its full dignity and usefulness. 
It asks for no excuses for its existence. It either is 
or is not something definite and sufficient in and 
of itself. There is infinite weakness and danger in 
the position that a person owes his attendance upon 
church service simply because of his children or soci- 
ety. There is common confession that there is noth- 
ing left in the Church but the occasion for setting a 
righteous example. To stay at home until the chil- 
dren are old enough to be harmed by the influence 
of the habit is at best but to half-save them and to 
insult the service of God. Either, we repeat, the 
Church is something in and of itself, something need- 
ful to every individual soul, without any reference to 
others or any possible jDOsing for example's sake, or it 
is nothing. 

Indeed, the need is the fixed quantity in the prob- 
lem. The body daily recognizes the want of nourish- 
ment, while countless forms of intellectual pabulum 



236 Ecce Spiritus. 

minister to the mind. The last factor in the human 
trinity remains still unnoticed, and unmet with any 
form of stated nutriment, until that spiritual force 
which resides in sympathy and communion of soul 
with soul supplies the needed food. So long as life 
lasts, the various means of inspiration and impres- 
siveness which a true Church of God can bring to 
bear will have an important part to play. But the 
Church must be careful to recognize and meet the 
need. It must be honest, manly, simple, and sincere, 
with the manliness and simplicity of Jesus. With 
the gravest of responsibilities, it must be true to the 
highest, and yet true in all practical and helpful ways. 
The Church can no longer hope to stand in the - 
strength of impregnable doctrine, but in its own 
living desirableness, in the claim that is recognized 
by every touched and satisfied consciousness. It can 
always prove itself good and true in that sphere 
which most readily yields allegiance, the inner life of 
man. Here, it must pass on from bald statement to 
actual realization, speaking out of consciousness the 
last word it knows. Its virtue resides not in its spec- 
ulative acumen, but in its experimental certainty. It 
is a living voice, a personal power, and must get in close 
to the realities. Its appeal is to life, and it utters 
nothing that has not been lived. It does not hasten 
away from the bed of sickness or the door of death 
from sheer want of something to say or do, but is 
born of a call that antedated all the parishes, in the 
suffering and sweetened depths of actual experience. 
To have assimilated temptation and sorrow in a per- 



The Faith of the Future. 237 

sonal triumph is the only consecration to the min- 
istry of God. 

The faith of the future, using that term in its or- 
ganized sense, will have to do with stimulation, and 
not with undue soothing of the insatiable craving to 
know. And yet it will be in no sense a chair of the- 
ological learning. The lesson will be nothing until 
it is driven home. It will not so much think as set 
others thinking. A little contagious thought is better 
than the most masterful but unmagnetic of ratiocina- 
tions. The Church will be a power in the opinions of 
men, but will not strive unduly to impart mere knowl- 
edge, seeing how readily the human mind takes to the 
condition of a sieve, and convinced that receptivity 
of mind is less vital than exercise. Well-filled tables 
without intellectual money and personal price have 
never ministered greatly to the world's strength of 
thought and life. The method of Jesus in thk; 
respect must return, in teaching men to save them- 
selves. He died for men, but for does not mean 
instead of So he thinks for the benefit of mankind, 
and in no sense to the lightening of its responsibility 

The Church is the logical result of all right think 

© © 

ing in vital fusion, and operative directly and prai 
tically in personal ways. To know about the soul 
is not enough. Soul knowledge and its utterance 

© o 

and action constitute the only religious effectiveness. 
The lecture is not going to take the place of the 
sermon ; but the sermon itself is to be taken back 
to the Mount, and dipped in the dews of a new con- 
secration. The literary function of the puipit is to 



238 JEJcce Sjnritus. 

give way to the living : the power of personality is to 
do the saving work so long delegated to mere opin- 
ion. It is to exist, not to ornament, but to energize 
into vital play the realms of thought and feeling. " It 
is not for the preacher," says Grimm, in his recent 
Life of Goethe, u to offer on special occasions care- 
fully studied productions, afterward to be printed, but 
at every opportunity to pour out from a full heart 
living words." 

Life is perennially needy, but inspiration is born 
of the need. The faith of the future will be a life 
rounded from the body up to a realization of the 
highest spiritual prerogative. Speculation may fail, 
but life is larger than speculation, and may be trusted 
to verify its own best intuitions, and find its way out 
into certainty and peace. If the questions of the soul 
rested in any more partial hands, we might well 
despair for the future of religion. But, since all of 
man is in the need, the coming experience of his life 
and its history must be full of hope. So long as we 
are sure that we cannot get away from ourselves, we 
have no fear. When life ceases to be all there is, it 
will be time for life to utter its complaint. Its fear 
has ever come from without. It can find no fear in 
itself, when it has come to the recognition of its 
essential existence. And this inward assurance will 
learn to find its completest expression as men come 
together on the higher plane, as they associate and 
sympathize as spiritual beings. True life needs a 
new insistence, which can only come in its fulness 
through this communion of soul with soul. 



"A VERITABLE HAND-BOOK OF NOBLE LIVING." 



THE DUTIES OF WOMEN. 

A COURSE OF LECTURES 
By FRANCES POWER COBBE. 



CRITICAL NOTICES. 
An eminent American clergyman, writing from London, says : — 
" It is the profoundest, wisest, purest, noblest book, in principle, aim, and tone, 
yet written upon the True Position of Woman in Society. It should be circu- 
lated far and wide among all classes of our countrywomen. It should be made 
a class-book in our schools. It should become the ' Hand-Book ' and Vade Mecum 
of young American girls." 

" As I turn the pages of this book, I am struck with its candor, sympathy, and 
insight, and wish that it might be read and pondered by both conservative and 
radical women. The former might learn the relation of freedom to duty, and the 
latter may well consider the perils which surround each onward step. „ . . Miss 
Cobbe might have called her book 'Old Duties in New Lights.' It must help 
many women to lead sincere, self-reliant lives, and to determine at critical 
moments what their action shall be."— Mrs. Elizabeth K. Churchill, in the Provi- 
dence Journal. 

" The best of all books on 'Women's Duties.' Now that George Eliot is gone, 
there is probably no woman in England so well equipped for general literary 
work as Miss Cobbe."— Col. T. Wentworth Higginson, in Woman's Journal. 

" I desire to commend it to the careful perusal of women in our own country, 
as a book full of timely counsel and suggestion, and to all, as a valuable contri- 
bution to the literature of ethics."— Julia Ward Howe, in Christian Register* 

" Just now, the first ' Duty of Women ' is to read this whole book with studious 
self-application: for it is rich in saving common sense, warm with the love of 
man, and consecrated by the love of God." — Miss Harriet Ware Hall, in Unitarian 
Review, 

" What is best in the whole book is that she founds her teaching for women so 
strongly in the deepest and simplest moral principles that her thoughts come 
with a force and breadth which win for them at once a respectable hearing."— 
London Spectator. 

"One of the notable books of the season. . . . No true woman can read these 
lectures without being stirred by them to completer life. "—Morning Star. 

"In Miss Cobbe's latest book, ' The Duties of Women,' there is much to be com- 
mended for its common sense and its helpfulness. Miss Cobbe goes down to the 
principles underlying the topics of which she speaks; and the strength with 
which she utters her thoughts is the strength of conviction and of earnest pur- 
pose."— Sunday School Times. 

" This is the very volume needed for parents to intrust to their daughters 
when leaving home for school, and for earnest friends to offer young brides, as 
a wedding gift." 

Fourth Edition. Cloth. 12mo. &1.00. 

New Cheap Edition. Paper. 25 cents. 



For sale by bookseller 's, and mailed, postpaid) on receipt oj the Price y by 

Geo. H. Ellis, Publisher, Boston. 



INSTITUTE ESSAYS; 

READ BEFORE THE " MINISTERS' INSTITUTE," PROVI- 
DENCE, R,I M OCTOBER, 1879. 

CONTENTS : 

Introduction, Rev. H. W. Bellows. 

Father, son, and Holy Ghost, Rev. S. R. Calthrop. 

The Relation of Modern Philosophy to Lib- 
eralism, Prof. C. C. Everett. 

Influence of Philosophy upon Christianity, F. E. Abbot. 

Monotheism and the Jetvs, Dr. Gustav Gottheil. 

The Idea of God Rev. J. W. Chadwick. 

The authorship of the Fourth Gospel, . . . Prof. Ezra Abfot. 

The Gospel of John Rev. Francis i iffany. 

Methods of Dealing with Social Questions, Rev. J. P. Harrison. 

Ethical Law and Social Order, Rev. Geo. Eatchelor. 

"To the reader of comparative theologies, this hook has a special interest."— 
Z ion's Herald. 

" The publication of this volume is one of the great tide-marks of theological 
progress in the United States"— Free Religious Index. 

: 'Of all the compilations to which Unitarian discussions have given rise, this 
will be found the most solid and meaty."— Christian Register. 

" The cause of Unitarianism will have to take care of itself ; hut it is a matter 
of great public importance when clergymen, however stationed in practical life, 
address themselves without reserve and without qualification to the ascertain 
ment of philosophic truth. How well this has heen done at the Providence 
meeting ot the ' Institute' is shown by this volume, which is entitled to the cor- 
dial attention not only of students of 'theology, but also of those interested in 
high truth. Those who know enough, and those whose religious svstem has been 
completed, had better not approach a volume which, to a seeker after facts, is 
wonderfully grateful and stimuhiting."— Boston Advertiser. 

8vo, 280 pp. Cloth, $1. 25; paper, §1.00. 



THREE PHASES OF MODERN THEOLOGY? 

CALVINISM, UNITARIANISM, LIBERALISM. 
By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, A.M., 

LECTURER OX ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY IS HARVARD UNIVERSITY. 

" The addresses rest throughout on Christian theism, the ethical spirit, the 
temperate soul, vast reading, and good judgment. They are singularly dispas 
sionate and well balanced, and good readers will find them healthful as well as 
stimulating and helpful."— Boston Advertiser. 

8vo, 68 pp. Paper. Price 35 cents. 



THE MINISTER'S HAND-BOOK, 

FOR CHRISTENINGS, WEDDINGS, AND FUNERALS. 

COMPILED AND ARRANGED 

By Rev MINOTJ. SAVAGE. 

This little volume contains a service for the "baptism of children, several forms 
of marriage service, and a variety of burial services, with a number of selections 
in prose and poetry suitable for use at funerals. At the ei d of the book are a 
dozen blank pages, for such additions as individual taste may indicate. It is well 

Erinted in clear, large type, and put up in neat, flexible binding. ire size and shape 
eing arranged especially for the pocket. 
Flexible cloth, 75 cents; full Turkey morocco, gilt edsres, stamped 
with owner's name in gold, $2.50. 

For sale by booksellers, or sent by mail by 
Geo. H. Ellis, Publisher, 141 Franklin Street, Boston. 



